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The Permission Structure that Accommodates Scams and Online Criminality in Africa – 2025

September 23rd, 2025|♦ CRIMINOLOGY / VICTIMOLOGY, 2025, AFRICAN SCAMS & SCAMMERS, Culture Of Scamming, Cybercrime Analysis, Insights, Organized Crime, Terrorism & Scams, • BUSINESS IMPOSTER SCAM, • INVESTMENT SCAM, • OTHER TRUSTED PARTY SCAM, • RELATIVE/FAMILY/FRIEND SCAM, ♦ HOW SCAMMERS OPERATE, ♦ SCAMPEDIA: CATALOG OF SCAMS|3 Comments
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Scam Victims’ Fear of Being Judged Incompetent – 2025

September 13th, 2025|♦ SCAM VICTIM RECOVERY, 2025, For New Victims, Impact of Scams on Victims, Insights, NORTH AMERICA SCAMS & SCAMMERS, Psychology of Scams, Recovery Psychology, Scam Victim Recovery, Scam Victims In Denial, Scam Victims Legal & Civil Rights, Self Help - Supporting Yourself, ♦ ABOUT MONEY MULES, ♦ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCAMS, ♦ FOR FAMILY & FRIENDS, ♦ MONEY MULES|0 Comments
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Grandparent Scams – Crime Typology Overview / Victim Impact Analysis – 2025

September 13th, 2025|CRIME TYPOLOGY OVERVIEW, 2025, Elder Abuse Crimes, Emergency / Crisis / Disaster Scams, Grandparent Scams, Insights, Phone Scams, VICTIM IMPACT ANALYSIS, • OTHER TRUSTED PARTY SCAM, • RELATIVE/FAMILY/FRIEND SCAM, ♦ CRIMINOLOGY / VICTIMOLOGY, ♦ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCAMS, ♦ FOR FAMILY & FRIENDS, ♦ HOW SCAMS WORK, ♦ SCAM BASICS, ♦ SCAM WARNINGS & ALERTS, ♦ SCAMPEDIA: CATALOG OF SCAMS, ♦ SPOTING SCAMS - ANTI-SCAM TIPS CLUES & RED FLAGS|0 Comments
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Identifying Fake Crypto Investments (Pig Butchering Scams) – 2025 Edition

September 6th, 2025|♦ HOW SCAMS WORK, 2025, Crypto Investment Scams/Pig Butchering Scams, Cryptocurrency Scams, Guides, Insights, Money Recovery, Scammer Techniques & Methods, Spotting Scammers, • INVESTMENT SCAM, ♦ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCAMS, ♦ MONEY RECOVERY, ♦ SCAM BASICS, ♦ SCAM WARNINGS & ALERTS, ♦ SCAMPEDIA: CATALOG OF SCAMS, ♦ SPOTING SCAMS - ANTI-SCAM TIPS CLUES & RED FLAGS|0 Comments
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Identifying Fake U.S. Soldiers – 2025 Edition

September 6th, 2025|♦ HOW SCAMS WORK, 2025, Guides, Impersonation & Identity Theft Scams, Insights, Romance Scams & Relationship Scams, Spotting Scammers, U.S. Military & Scams, • ROMANCE IMPOSTER SCAM, ♦ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCAMS, ♦ NEW SCAM VICTIMS, ♦ SCAM BASICS, ♦ SCAM WARNINGS & ALERTS, ♦ SCAMPEDIA: CATALOG OF SCAMS, ♦ SPOTING SCAMS - ANTI-SCAM TIPS CLUES & RED FLAGS|0 Comments
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Nigerian EFCC Scam Fighting Overview – 2025

August 8th, 2025|♦ LAW ENFORCEMENT - JUSTICE - INVESTIGATION, 2025, AFRICAN SCAMS & SCAMMERS, Anti-Money Laundering - AML, Arrests Convictions & Court Actions, Criminal Trials & Court, Government Policies, Governmental Entities & Agencies, Insights, Law Enforcement Agencies, Law Enforcement Support, Laws & Regulations, ♦ CRIMINOLOGY / VICTIMOLOGY, ♦ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCAMS, ♦ SCARS TOOLBOX|1 Comment
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The Danger of Scams – 6 Ways Scams Can Hurt You – 2025

August 1st, 2025|♦ HOW SCAMMERS OPERATE, 2025, Blackmail & Extortion Scams, Cybercrime, Emergency / Crisis / Disaster Scams, Extortion / Ransom / Sextortion, Impersonation & Identity Theft Scams, Insights, Online Safety, Scammer Techniques & Methods, Sextortion, ♦ CYBERSECURITY, ♦ ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCAMS, ♦ ONLINE SAFETY, ♦ SCAM BASICS, ♦ SPOTING SCAMS - ANTI-SCAM TIPS CLUES & RED FLAGS|1 Comment
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IMPORTANT FOR NEW VICTIMS
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IMPORTANT FOR NEW VICTIMS
Free Scam Survivor’s School

IMPORTANT FOR NEW VICTIMS
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How to Prepare & Report

LEARN TO AVOID
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Scam Psychology

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PLEASE NOTE: Psychology Clarification

The following specific modalities within the practice of psychology are restricted to psychologists appropriately trained in the use of such modalities:

  • Diagnosis: The diagnosis of mental, emotional, or brain disorders and related behaviors.
  • Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis is a type of therapy that focuses on helping individuals to understand and resolve unconscious conflicts.
  • Hypnosis: Hypnosis is a state of trance in which individuals are more susceptible to suggestion. It can be used to treat a variety of conditions, including anxiety, depression, and pain.
  • Biofeedback: Biofeedback is a type of therapy that teaches individuals to control their bodily functions, such as heart rate and blood pressure. It can be used to treat a variety of conditions, including stress, anxiety, and pain.
  • Behavioral analysis: Behavioral analysis is a type of therapy that focuses on changing individuals’ behaviors. It is often used to treat conditions such as autism and ADHD.
    Neuropsychology: Neuropsychology is a type of psychology that focuses on the relationship between the brain and behavior. It is often used to assess and treat cognitive impairments caused by brain injuries or diseases.

SCARS and the members of the SCARS Team do not engage in any of the above modalities in relationship to scam victims. SCARS is not a mental healthcare provider and recognizes the importance of professionalism and separation between its work and that of the licensed practice of psychology.

SCARS is an educational provider of generalized self-help information that individuals can use for their own benefit to achieve their own goals related to emotional trauma. SCARS recommends that all scam victims see professional counselors or therapists to help them determine the suitability of any specific information or practices that may help them.

SCARS cannot diagnose or treat any individuals, nor can it state the effectiveness of any educational information that it may provide, regardless of its experience in interacting with traumatized scam victims over time. All information that SCARS provides is purely for general educational purposes to help scam victims become aware of and better understand the topics and to be able to dialog with their counselors or therapists.

It is important that all readers understand these distinctions and that they apply the information that SCARS may publish at their own risk, and should do so only after consulting a licensed psychologist or mental healthcare provider.

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Disclaimer on the SCARS Institute’s Use of Artificial Intelligence in Writing

The SCARS Institute writers use artificial intelligence as one of several tools in the preparation, research, review, and production of educational material. AI does not replace our writers, editors, subject matter experts, researchers, or human judgment. People write, review, revise, approve, and publish our work.

Because of the way we write, some AI writing detectors can produce false positives and label human-written or heavily human-edited material as AI-generated. Those results should be treated with caution.

One reason is our writing style.

SCARS Institute material is written for people who have experienced trauma, fraud, betrayal, grief, shame, confusion, and other forms of emotional distress. That changes how we structure information. We use clear lead-ins, repeated concepts, section breaks, restatement of difficult ideas, and deliberate reinforcement of major points. We do this because a traumatized reader can struggle with concentration, working memory, attention, information retention, and cognitive overload. A sentence that seems repetitive to a casual reader can help someone under stress understand and remember the point being made.

Our writing is also highly structured. We have people on our team who were trained in older newspaper writing, technical writing, educational writing, and writing designed for high comprehension. We use established editorial practices drawn from sources such as The Chicago Manual of Style and The Yahoo! Style Guide, along with our own editorial rules developed for victim education.

There is an irony in that. Modern AI systems were trained on large amounts of professional writing produced in many of these same styles. Clean grammar, orderly paragraph structure, consistent terminology, repeated explanation, clear sectioning, and formal editorial discipline can all resemble the patterns that AI detectors associate with machine-generated text.

That does not mean the text was written by AI.

AI writing detectors do not determine authorship. They estimate patterns. Those patterns can appear in AI-generated writing, human writing, professionally edited writing, academic writing, technical writing, legal writing, journalism, and highly structured educational material. A detector can flag human work because the prose is regular, grammatical, repetitive by design, or tightly organized. It can also fail to flag text that was produced with extensive AI assistance.

We do use AI in our editorial process.

Our team can use AI to help locate research, compare sources, identify missing questions, test possible ways of framing a subject, organize complex material, check structure, review grammar and spelling, identify unclear passages, and help us see where an explanation needs more work. AI can also help with proofreading and consistency across long educational materials.

Those functions are similar to using search tools, grammar checkers, reference software, editorial software, dictionaries, style guides, and research databases. The tool can assist the work. It does not carry responsibility for the finished publication.

Our human team does.

Our writers write every article or story. Every SCARS Institute publication goes through human review and editing. We decide what belongs in the material, what does not, what claims require support, what wording is appropriate for traumatized readers, what examples are responsible, and whether the final work reflects our standards. We reject suggestions that do not meet those standards. We rewrite material when it does not sound like us, does not fit the subject, or does not serve the people we are trying to help.

We also maintain a consistent page structure in each our websites, which can be different in each website. Headings, section order, terminology, metadata, internal links, explanatory blocks, and other page elements follow patterns that help readers find information and help search engines and AI systems understand what each page is about. That structure is deliberate. We want a scam victim searching for a specific problem to find the right material, and we want machines indexing our sites to understand the subject accurately enough to present it when someone asks for help.

This can make our pages look even more regular to automated detection systems.

We are not interested in disguising our use of AI, and we are not interested in pretending that modern publishing happens without digital tools. We are interested in producing accurate, readable, responsible material for people who need it.

AI assists parts of that work.

Humans remain responsible for the writing, the judgment, the editing, and the final publication.

SCARS Institute Team

SCARS Institute - Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.

SCARS Institute™ Encyclopedia of Scams™ RomanceScamsNOW.com
Continuously Published for 26 Years – Since 2000
Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. [SCARS]

is a publication of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. [registered dba SCARS]

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