Our mission
Make the safer next step easier to see.
Modern scams often succeed by creating urgency, fear, excitement or secrecy. Those emotions can make an unusual request feel temporarily reasonable. Stop & Verify turns the focus away from how convincing a message looks and toward the behaviour behind it.
Our goal is not to frighten people or label every unfamiliar contact as fraudulent. It is to encourage one protective habit: stop, verify through a separate trusted channel, and only then decide what to do.
Our approach
Patterns before predictions.
The 60-second check looks for recurring tactics such as unusual urgency, secret instructions, requests for credentials, irreversible payment methods and resistance to independent verification.
Guidance is developed from public information published by consumer protection bodies, financial regulators, law-enforcement agencies and trusted service providers. Our detailed process is available in the editorial policy.
Privacy by design
We do not need to see the suspicious message.
The checklist asks about the situation rather than asking visitors to upload screenshots, paste links or share conversations. Answers remain in the browser and are not attached to an account or profile.
- No account or sign-in
- No message, link, screenshot or document uploads
- No request for passwords, verification codes or payment details
- No claim that an automated result proves something is safe
Independence and funding
Advertising does not decide the guidance.
Stop & Verify is not affiliated with a bank, police force, financial regulator, social network or technology company. References to an organisation do not imply its endorsement of this website.
The current version does not display advertising. Advertising may be introduced later to support operating costs. If that happens, ads will be visually separated from editorial content and will not influence which scams, services or organisations we discuss.
Important limits
Education is not authentication.
We cannot investigate individuals, confirm identities, recover money, guarantee that a request is genuine or replace professional legal, financial, cybersecurity or law-enforcement advice.