Our methodology

This page explains how a report gets from "someone told us about this" to a published page with a company's name on it — and what to do if you think we got it wrong.

Where reports come from#

• Reader submissions — through our report form, from people who encountered a scheme directly.
• Our own research — cross-referencing regulator and law-enforcement announcements (for example the FTC, SEC, DOJ and FCA), consumer-protection press releases, and other public reporting.
• Some early drafts are assembled with the help of automated tools that pull together public sources into a first pass — but nothing from that process is published until a human editor has fact-checked it, rewritten anything that needs it, and approved it. Automation only produces a first draft; a person always makes the final decision.

Before we publish#

• We don't publish on the strength of a single, unverified complaint.
• We look for supporting evidence — correspondence, domain registration details, screenshots, and reports from more than one person where we can get them.
• We check whether a regulator or consumer-protection authority has already taken action against, or issued a warning about, the company.
• Every published report links its sources, so you can check our work yourself.

How we write about evidence we can't fully verify#

Not every scheme we cover has a regulator finding behind it — some are backed only by reader complaints, and some pieces are purely explanatory with no accusation against any specific company. We write to match the evidence: where something is alleged but not independently confirmed, we say so explicitly rather than stating it as settled fact.

Our independence#

We don't accept payment to remove, alter, or influence a published report, and we don't charge people for the free-help service described on our About page. A correction request is reviewed the same way regardless of who sends it.

If you think we got something wrong#

Contact us via the details on our About page, including if you represent a company named in a report. We review correction requests against the sources behind the report and update, add context to, or remove it where the evidence warrants that.