About The Fraud Center

What we do

We report on scams and fraud affecting people in the UK. Alongside the reporting we run three public databases and one free tool: a searchable archive of the Financial Conduct Authority's Warning List, a file on every firm or operator we have written about, a dated timeline of warnings, enforcement and rule changes, and the firm checker, which reports what official UK sources say about a name, reference number or website at the moment you search.

Our audience is the general reader, not the compliance profession. We write for someone who has just been sent a link, been cold-called, or been asked to move money "for safekeeping", and who needs to know within a minute whether the name in front of them appears anywhere official.

What we are not

We are not a regulator, a police force, a bank, a law firm or a claims management company, and we are not affiliated with any of them. We do not assess whether anyone has a claim, we do not estimate compensation, and we never ask how much a reader has lost — there is no field anywhere in our systems that records a loss amount, because collecting one would put us on the wrong side of the line we have chosen to stand behind.

We do not accept affiliate income, referral fees or sponsored placements, and we do not introduce readers to solicitors, claims management companies or representatives of any kind. The full commercial position is on the ownership and funding page.

How we source stories

Automated ingestion watches published feeds from the FCA, the National Cyber Security Centre, the Bank of England, GOV.UK and a small number of established consumer and industry publishers. Those feeds fill an editorial queue and nothing more. No item reaches publication automatically: every story has a named author, an editor's sign-off, and — where it names a firm or an individual — a documented public-interest rationale and a recorded right of reply.

Where we summarise another publication's work we use a headline, our own two-sentence summary and a link. We do not reproduce a third party's article, structure or phrasing, and we do not present another newsroom's reporting as our own.

How we verify a claim

Before a factual claim about a firm or a person is published, it has to clear four checks:

1. Primary source. A regulator notice, court or tribunal record, company filing, or a document we hold. Secondary reporting alone is not enough to make a critical claim.
2. Identity. The firm named in the source is the firm we are writing about — matched on reference number, registered number or website, not on name alone. Clone firms make name matching unsafe.
3. Currency. The source still says what we say it says on the day we publish. Warning List entries and register records are withdrawn and amended, and we record the date we last checked.
4. Reply. Where the claim is critical, the substance has been put to the subject with a deadline, and the outcome recorded.

How the firm checker works

The checker normalises what you type, then looks for an exact match in the Warning List archive, then a close-name match, then the FCA Register, then Companies House. It returns one of four verdicts and links to every source behind it:

• On the FCA Warning List — the FCA has published a warning about this name or website.
• Possible clone — the name closely resembles an authorised firm or a warned entry.
• No match found — nothing official mentions it. This is not a clean bill of health.
• Appears authorised — a matching entry exists on the FCA Register. That is a status, not a recommendation, and it does not remove clone risk.

Queries are not stored against you: no IP address, no session identifier, no query text tied to a visitor. See the privacy notice for the detail, and the disclaimer for the limits of each verdict.

How the Warning List archive works

We hold our own dated copy of Warning List entries so that a reader can see when an entry first appeared, when it last changed, and what it said at the time. The FCA's page remains the authoritative record and is linked from every entry. Where the regulator withdraws an entry, we keep the historical record and mark it as withdrawn rather than deleting it silently.

Naming firms and people

We name a firm where an authoritative public source names it, or where our own reporting stands the claim up. We name a private individual only when an editor has recorded, before publication, why doing so is in the public interest. That gate is enforced in our publishing system, not by convention: a story naming an individual cannot be published without the note, and the note is shown on the story.

Being named in a warning is not a finding of criminal guilt, and we do not write as though it is. Where a firm tells us an entry is a clone of its own identity, we say so prominently — victims of impersonation are harmed twice when reporting is careless.

The language we use

We write "reported", "alleged", "the FCA says" and "we have seen no evidence that" where those are the accurate words. We avoid "victim-blaming" framing: people are defrauded by organised operations, not by being foolish. We avoid urgency and fear as devices — scams already supply enough of both.

Where automation is used

Automation collects and de-duplicates published feeds, matches names against our archive, and flags items for an editor. It does not write published copy, decide what is true, or publish anything. Every published word is written or edited by a named person who is accountable for it.

Accessibility and reader controls

The site is built to WCAG 2.2 AA as a working target: semantic headings, visible focus, text that reflows to 320px without horizontal scrolling, colour contrast checked against tokens rather than guessed, and a text-size control in the header that persists between visits. Animation is restrained and stops entirely for readers whose system asks for reduced motion. If something on the site is unusable for you, tell us and we will treat it as a bug.

If you have lost money

Contact your bank first, then the Financial Ombudsman Service, then Action Fraud, and use the FCA consumer helpline on 0800 111 6768 for questions about authorisation. All four are free to use. Those are the only routes we will ever point you to — see contacting your bank and the Ombudsman.

Contacting the newsroom

Corrections, right-of-reply requests and complaints go through the contact page; confidential material goes through the tip line. We log every complaint with the date it arrived, and we answer correction requests the same working day wherever we can.