Quick answer: you are probably being scammed if someone you have never met in person is pushing you to send money fast, wants you to keep it quiet, asks you to pay in crypto, gift cards or to a “safe” account, or will not let you withdraw money you supposedly made. Any one of these is a warning sign. Two or more together is a scam until proven otherwise.
If you typed “am I being scammed?” into Google, some part of you already knows the answer. This guide gives you the checks Australian fraud investigators use to answer that question, a 60-second scam check you can do right now, and exactly what to do if the answer turns out to be yes.
Am I being scammed? The 60-second scam check
Answer these five questions honestly. Each “yes” is a red flag.
- Did they contact you first? A cold call, text, email, social media message, dating-app match or “wrong number” that turned into a conversation.
- Is there a deadline? “Today only”, “the account will be frozen”, “the tax office will arrest you”, “the exchange closes your position at midnight”.
- Have you been told not to tell anyone? Your bank, your family, your accountant. Scammers isolate you because anyone outside the conversation will spot it.
- Is the money going somewhere unusual? Cryptocurrency, gift cards, PayID to a personal name, an overseas account, a “trading platform” you had never heard of a month ago.
- Have you been asked to pay to get your own money? A tax, a fee, an unlock charge, insurance on a withdrawal. Legitimate platforms deduct fees from your balance. They never make you deposit more to release it.
One “yes” means slow down. Two means stop sending money today. Three or more means you are being scammed, and the section on what to do right now is the most important part of this page.
15 warning signs you are being scammed
People rarely ask “am I being scammed?” without a reason. These are the signs we see again and again in the cases that reach us. They are grouped by how the scam is being run: pressure, the money, the person, and the platform.
Pressure and secrecy
1. Urgency that never lets up. Every real decision about money can wait 24 hours. Scammers cannot afford to give you 24 hours, because that is when you talk to someone and the spell breaks. If the pressure is constant, the pressure is the scam.
2. You have been told to keep it quiet. “Don’t tell the bank, they’ll block it.” “Don’t tell your kids, they won’t understand.” “This opportunity isn’t public.” Secrecy has exactly one purpose: stopping anyone who would recognise the scam from seeing it.
3. Threats from “authorities”. The ATO, Australian Federal Police, Services Australia, Border Force and your bank’s “fraud team” do not phone you demanding immediate payment, and they never ask you to move money to a “safe account”.
If someone claiming to be one of them wants money today, hang up and call the real organisation on the number from its official website. If you are being scammed, the caller will try to keep you on the line; a real agency will not mind you calling back.
4. They coach you on what to tell your bank. If you have been given a script (“say it’s for a car”, “say you’re helping family”), you are being coached to get around the bank’s scam checks. Those checks exist to protect you from exactly this person.
The money
5. Payment by crypto, gift cards or PayID to a stranger. No legitimate business, government agency or investment firm in Australia takes payment in Apple gift cards or Bitcoin ATMs. And a company that asks you to PayID a personal name, or to deposit into an account held by a different person or company, is routing money through a mule account.
6. A small “starter” amount first. $250 to “open the account”, $500 to “verify”. The starter deposit does two things: it gets your bank details and it proves you will follow instructions. The big requests come after.
7. Profits you can see but cannot touch. The trading dashboard shows $37,000 in gains. Then you request a withdrawal and there is a tax, a fee, a “liquidity requirement” or a broker who suddenly wants you to invest more first. The balance was never real. The only real money is what you deposited.
8. You are asked to open a crypto exchange account. Being walked through setting up Kraken, Binance, CoinSpot or Swyftx by your “advisor”, then told which wallet address to send to, is the standard route for investment and romance scams in Australia. The exchange is real. The destination is the scammer.
9. Remote access to your computer. AnyDesk, TeamViewer, “let me show you on your screen”. Once a stranger controls your device they can see your banking, move money and change your passwords while you watch.
The person
10. You have never seen them live. Video calls keep failing, the camera is broken, they are on an oil rig, deployed overseas, in a hospital abroad. Months in, you still have not seen a live face. Photos prove nothing; a reverse image search will often show they belong to someone else.
11. Love, then money. Fast intimacy, plans for a future together, and then a crisis, a customs fee, a medical bill, or an “opportunity” they want to share with you. The order is always the same: trust first, money second.
12. Their identity does not check out. The company they work for has no Australian financial services licence. The ABN they quote belongs to a different business. Their LinkedIn is three months old. Their “senior partner” has a personal link to prove his role instead of a company email address.
The platform
13. A website or app you cannot find anywhere else. The trading site is not in the App Store or Google Play, you install it from a link, and searching its name brings up almost nothing. Real platforms have years of reviews, news coverage and regulator listings.
14. Guaranteed returns. “2% a day”, “guaranteed 30% a month”, “zero risk”. Nothing legitimate pays that. The higher the promise, the faster the money disappears.
15. A “recovery agent” who found you. If you were scammed before and someone has now contacted you offering to get the money back for an upfront fee, that is the same scam wearing a different suit. Recovery scams target previous victims because the scammers already have your details. Legitimate investigators do not cold-call victims.
How to run a proper scam check before you send more money
If you are still not sure whether you are being scammed, spend 20 minutes on the checks below before you send another dollar. They are free, they are what we do first on every case, and they catch most scams outright.
Check the company, not just the ABN
An ABN or ACN that comes up on ABN Lookup proves only that some company with that number exists. Scammers copy the details of real registered businesses and put a different trading name on top.
Check that the name on the register exactly matches the name on the website, and then search ASIC’s professional registers for an Australian Financial Services (AFS) licence if they are offering investments. No AFS licence means they cannot legally give you investment advice or run a trading platform in Australia.
Search the Moneysmart investor alert list
ASIC’s Moneysmart investor alert list names companies and websites that have been reported for operating without a licence or for scamming Australians. Search the platform’s name and its web address. If it is there, stop. If it is not there, that is not proof it is safe, only that it has not been reported yet.
Check the website’s age
A free WHOIS lookup shows when a domain was registered. A “global trading firm established 2009” whose website was registered eight weeks ago is a scam. Most fraudulent platforms live for less than a year before the site is abandoned and rebuilt under a new name.
Reverse image search the people
Save the profile photo of your contact, advisor or “account manager” and run it through Google Images or TinEye. Stolen photos of models, soldiers, doctors and minor celebrities are the backbone of romance and investment scams. If the same face appears under a different name, you have your answer.
Search the name plus “scam”
Search the platform name, the person’s name and the wallet address with the word “scam” after it, and check the Scamwatch website for reports. Other victims often post warnings on forums and review sites months before regulators act.
Try to withdraw
The single most reliable scam check for any investment or trading platform: request a withdrawal of part of your money back to your own Australian bank account. A real platform pays within days. A scam produces a reason you cannot have it.
“Is this a scam?” The most common types in Australia
Australians reported more than $2 billion in scam losses in 2024, according to the ACCC’s Targeting Scams report, and investment scams were the most costly category by a wide margin. These are the patterns behind most of the cases we investigate.
- Investment and trading platform scams. A search ad or social media post, a callback from an “advisor”, a small deposit, then crypto transfers to a fake platform showing fake profits. Withdrawal is blocked until you “invest more”. How investment scams work and what can be recovered.
- Romance scams. A relationship built over weeks or months on a dating app, Facebook or WhatsApp, followed by requests for money or an “investment tip”. Losses are often the largest of any scam type because they run for so long. Romance scams explained.
- Crypto scams. Fake wallets, fake exchanges, “pig butchering” schemes and fake recovery services. The crypto trail is traceable, which is why time matters. Crypto scams explained.
- Job and task scams. Paid “tasks” that require you to top up an account to unlock earnings. Job scams explained.
- Bank and government impersonation. Calls and texts pretending to be your bank, the ATO, myGov or Australia Post, pushing you to move money or hand over codes.
- Remote access scams. “Your computer has a virus”, “your NBN is compromised”, followed by a request to install software so they can “fix” it.
For the full list, see our guide to every scam type we investigate.
“I think I have been scammed.” What to do right now
The first 24 hours decide how much can be recovered. Do these in order.
- Stop all contact and send nothing more. Do not confront them, do not “test” them, do not pay a release fee. Every extra transfer is money that was recoverable and now is not.
- Call your bank’s fraud line now, not tomorrow. Ask for a recall on the most recent transfers. If the money went by Osko or PayID it may already be gone from the receiving account, but the bank can still flag the account and preserve records that identify who received it.
- If crypto was involved, save everything. Transaction IDs, the wallet addresses you sent to, screenshots of the platform, every email and chat. Download your exchange history before the exchange closes or freezes your account.
- Change passwords and remove remote access software. Start with email and banking. If they had access to your device, assume they still do until it has been cleaned.
- Report it. ReportCyber (the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s reporting portal) for online fraud, Scamwatch for the ACCC’s records, and IDCARE if your identity documents were shared. Reporting creates the paper trail that banks, exchanges and investigators rely on. It does not, on its own, recover money.
- Get a professional assessment before anyone else contacts you. Within days of a scam, previous victims start receiving calls from “recovery agents”. Any firm that finds you is a scam. A legitimate investigator will tell you honestly whether your money is traceable before you pay anything.
Our step-by-step guide, what to do after a scam, walks through each of these in detail.
Can you get your money back if you have been scammed?
Sometimes. Whether you were being scammed for a week or a year, it depends almost entirely on two things: how the money moved, and how fast you act.
- Bank transfer to an Australian account: the best chance. Mule accounts are held at real banks with real identity checks. A fast recall request plus a trace of where the money went next can recover funds that have not yet been moved offshore.
- Cryptocurrency: traceable, not anonymous. Every transaction is recorded on a public ledger. Funds can be followed from your exchange to the scammer’s wallet and, often, to the exchange where they cash out, which is where identity records and freezing requests come in. Read how crypto recovery in Australia actually works.
- Gift cards and cash: very difficult. This is precisely why scammers ask for them.
Be wary of anyone who promises recovery. The honest answer is always “let us look at the trail first”. If you are choosing between firms, our guide to telling legitimate recovery companies from the fakes lists the questions to ask.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if I’m being scammed?
Run the five-question check at the top of this page: did they contact you first, is there a deadline, have you been told to keep it quiet, is the money going somewhere unusual, and have you been asked to pay to access your own money? One yes is a warning. Two or more means you are being scammed until you can prove otherwise, so stop sending money and check the company, the person and the platform before doing anything else.
Am I being scammed if they ask for gift cards or cryptocurrency?
Almost certainly. No Australian government agency, bank, utility or legitimate investment firm accepts payment in gift cards, and none will direct you to a Bitcoin ATM. Crypto is a normal way to invest, but being told by a stranger which exchange to open and which wallet address to send to is the standard pattern of investment and romance scams.
How do I check if a website or trading platform is a scam?
Search the platform on ASIC’s Moneysmart investor alert list, confirm it holds an Australian Financial Services licence on ASIC’s professional registers, run a WHOIS lookup to see when the domain was registered, and search the name with the word “scam”. Then request a small withdrawal to your own bank account. A real platform pays within days; a scam gives you a reason it cannot.
What if the company has a real ABN or ACN?
An ABN only proves that a company with that number exists somewhere. Scammers routinely copy the registration details of genuine businesses and trade under a slightly different name. Check that the registered name exactly matches the name on the website and on your documents, and check for an AFS licence if they are offering investments. A real ABN attached to the wrong trading name is a red flag, not reassurance.
Can my bank tell me if I’m being scammed?
Often, yes. Bank fraud teams see the same mule accounts and payment patterns every day, which is exactly why scammers tell you not to talk to the bank and coach you on what to say. If you are unsure, call your bank’s fraud line before the transfer, not after, and answer their questions honestly.
Is it a scam if they want me to install AnyDesk or TeamViewer?
If a stranger who contacted you wants remote access to your computer or phone, yes. Remote access tools are legitimate software, but once a scammer is connected they can see your banking, move money and change your passwords while you watch. Disconnect, uninstall the software and change your passwords from a different device.
I think I have been scammed. What should I do first?
Stop all contact and send nothing more, then call your bank’s fraud line immediately and ask for a recall on the latest transfers. Save every transaction ID, wallet address, screenshot and message. Report to ReportCyber and Scamwatch, and get an honest professional assessment of whether the money can be traced before any “recovery agent” contacts you. The first 24 hours matter most.
Should I confront the scammer or keep talking to gather evidence?
No. Confronting them warns them to empty the accounts your money is sitting in, and continuing the conversation gives them another chance to extract a “final” payment. Save what you already have, stop responding, and let the bank, the exchange and an investigator work from the records.
How long do I have to get my money back after a scam?
There is no fixed deadline, but the odds fall every day. Bank transfers have the best chance if a recall is requested within hours, while the receiving account still holds the funds. Cryptocurrency remains traceable for years because the ledger is permanent, but the funds are far easier to freeze before they reach an exchange and are cashed out. Act the same day if you can.
Still asking “am I being scammed?” Talk to an investigator today
If you have read this far and the answer to “am I being scammed?” looks like yes, do not wait for certainty. CyBear Track & Expose is an Australian investigation firm. We trace stolen money across bank and crypto rails, identify who received it, and build the evidence banks, exchanges and police need to act. If you have lost $10,000 or more, or you are being pressured to send it, request a free, confidential case assessment. We will tell you straight whether the money can be followed.
