What we found
An FTC consumer alert published 28 August 2026 states that many people experience fraud but never report it, and that scammers count on victims staying silent. According to that alert, a report filed with the FTC goes into the Consumer Sentinel Network, described as a secure national database available to local, state and federal law enforcement. The same alert says FTC investigators, lawyers and analysts review reports to spot patterns and build cases, and that staff also use reports to find new scams to write about in Consumer Alerts. The alert directs readers to tell one person what the scam looked like, to report what happened at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and to subscribe to Consumer Alerts, and links a video on why reporting matters. If a scam approach reaches you, do one thing before you move on: describe it out loud to one person you know, then file it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov the same day while the details are fresh. Type the reporting address into your browser yourself rather than following a link sent to you, because a reporting page is exactly the kind of destination an impersonator would fake. Our harvested material does not include any figures for how many reports the FTC receives, how many result in cases, or what happens to money already sent. We also harvested only the headlines of two other FTC alerts, on CAPTCHA scams and job scams, with no body text, so we cannot describe how either of those scams works. This alert was assembled from the harvested source text listed above and nothing else; LIVEFRAUD ALERTS is independent and not affiliated with the FTC or any agency named here.
- The central claims come from a single official FTC consumer alert with full body text, quoted closely.
- Two of the three harvested rows are title-and-URL only with no body, so they support nothing.
- The source describes a reporting process, not an active scam with a named mechanism, so there is no second source to cross-check against.
- Reviewed by 2 models from independent houses.
THE RULE
Low direct money risk in this material; the practical risk is a reader searching for a reporting page and landing on a lookalike site that harvests personal details instead.
What we don’t know
- How many reports the FTC receives, and how many lead to enforcement action.
- Whether reporting helps an individual recover funds already sent.
- What the harvested CAPTCHA scam and job scam alerts actually describe, since only their headlines were harvested.
- Which scams, if any, are currently circulating in the reader's area.
The bench — who voted
2 INDEPENDENT AI MODELS REVIEWED THIS. ALL 2: MODERATE RISK.
The card names a count. Here are the seats behind it, with what each one said.
GROQopenai/gpt-oss-120b · MODERATE
Finding adds multiple claims (scammers count on silence, investigators review reports, staff use reports for new alerts, specific advice to tell one person, type URL manually) not present in the cited evidence.
OPENROUTERopenrouter/free · MODERATE
The evidence row says 'FTC staff spotting patterns' while the finding says 'investigators, lawyers and analysts review reports to spot patterns and build cases.' The finding adds specificity about reviewer roles (investigators, lawyers, analysts) that the evidence does not explicitly name.
Reviewed by 2 independent models: 1 found it carried by the evidence, 1 did not.
▼ Protocol & challenge record
Objection (medium): Source-to-claim stretch on the core sentence. The harvested text says 'When you file a report with the FTC, it goes into Consumer Sentinel Network.' It never says that reports filed *at ReportFraud.ftc.gov specifically* enter Sentinel — the URL appears only later, in the action list. The headline claim ('scam reports filed at ReportFraud.ftc.gov feed a national law enforcement database') and the evidence row's claim_sentence both weld the two together. It is a very likely inference and probably true in the world, but it is an inference, not a quotation, and the evidence row is written as if it were quoted. Fix: 'reports filed with the FTC — which the alert tells readers to do at ReportFraud.ftc.gov — enter the Consumer Sentinel Network.'
Resolved: Resolvable by wording only. Rewrite the claim and the evidence claim_sentence so the Sentinel statement is attached to 'a report filed with the FTC' and ReportFraud.ftc.gov is presented as the alert's stated reporting destination, not as the thing the source says feeds Sentinel. Note the finding's own body sentence already gets this right ('a report filed with the FTC goes into the Consumer Sentinel Network') — it is the top-line claim and the evidence row that overreach, so the fix is mechanical.
Objection (medium): Unsourced causal assertion dressed as reasoning. 'because a reporting page is exactly the kind of destination an impersonator would fake' is a factual claim about scammer behaviour with zero support in the harvested rows and no row_ids. The advice itself (type the address yourself) is defensible generic hygiene; the justification is invented. Either drop the 'because' clause or mark it explicitly as the publication's own reasoning, not the FTC's.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): Invented urgency. 'the same day while the details are fresh' has no basis in the source, which gives no timeframe at all. Small, but it is exactly the kind of unforced specificity that erodes the 'nothing but the harvested text' disclaimer sitting three sentences later.
Resolved: Delete 'the same day while the details are fresh' or reattribute as house advice. No source dependency either way.
Objection (medium): Genre mislabel / alert-fatigue risk. This is an evergreen FTC process explainer about why reporting matters. There is no active scam, no named mechanism, no lure, no loss, no timeframe. Wrapping it in 'ATTENTION:' callout, watch icons, a 'send them this alert today' directive and a risk_line manufactures threat framing the source does not carry. The confidence_reasons half-admit this ('a reporting process, not an active scam') but the presentation does not.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Rejected option list contains a garbled and stigmatising callout: 'ATTENTION: SCAMMEDS'. That is not a word, and the nearest reading labels victims. 'ATTENTION: PARENTS' is also unsupported — parents appear nowhere in the source. These should never have reached a candidate list that is preserved on the record.
Resolved: Strike 'ATTENTION: SCAMMEDS' and 'ATTENTION: PARENTS' from callout_options. The selected callout, 'ANYONE WHO SPOTTED A SCAM', tracks the source headline almost exactly and is fine.
Objection (low): Audience mismatch in directive_options: 'Send this to any investigator you know' and 'Forward this to the investigators in your life' point at law enforcement. The source is a consumer-facing alert; the only mention of investigators is FTC staff reviewing reports. Wrong-audience directives.
Resolved: Strike both investigator directives from directive_options; the selected directive is source-aligned.
Objection (low): Self-serving graft on an FTC instruction. The alert says 'Tell one person in your life what the scam looked like.' The share_directive converts this into 'Tell one person ... then send them this alert today.' The second half is LIVEFRAUD's own ask riding on FTC authority. Keep the two visibly separate.
Resolved: Split the directive into the FTC's instruction (tell one person) and the publication's ask (forward this), so authority is not borrowed.
Objection (low): Confidence reasoning is partly wrong. 'no second source to cross-check against' is a weak downgrade for a claim that is purely attributive ('the FTC says X'), where the primary document is the whole evidentiary universe. The real reason for less-than-full confidence is thin scope and reliance on a single harvest, not corroboration failure. Also, listing two body-less rows as a reason to lower confidence is odd: rows that support nothing should be excluded, not counted against the claims they never touched.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): The CAPTCHA/job-scam limitation sentence names two threats the piece cannot describe. It is honest, but it seeds two scam names in a reader's head with no content, and the 2025-09 job scam row is roughly a year older than the lead item. If it stays, it should not imply either is currently circulating.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): Date currency unverifiable from the packet. The lead row is stamped 2026-08-28 and the corpus runs to 2026-06 and 2025-09. Nothing here establishes how stale the 2026-08-28 alert is relative to publication, and 'shape the alerts it publishes' is written in a continuing present tense. Low risk because the claim is attributive and the source is evergreen, but the gap is not addressed anywhere.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): watch_icons 'video' and 'link' are marginal — the video is in the FTC page and the finding mentions it, but this piece does not surface either. Cosmetic, but icons imply artefacts the reader can act on.
Resolved: Drop 'link' and 'video' icons or surface the FTC video link explicitly.
Preserved dissent
ON THE RECORDI do not think this should run as an ALERT. There is no scam here — no lure, no mechanism, no loss, no timeframe, no named target. It is the FTC explaining its own intake process. Every piece of alarm apparatus in this draft (the ATTENTION callout, the watch icons, the risk_line, 'today', 'the same day') was supplied by us, not by the source. Publishing evergreen agency PR in threat livery is how an alert channel teaches its readers to stop reading alerts.
ON THE RECORDThe risk_line is a fabrication of convenience. 'The practical risk is a reader searching for a reporting page and landing on a lookalike site' appears nowhere in the harvested text and exists mainly so the format has a risk to display. If the honest answer is 'this material carries essentially no direct risk', say that and leave the field short.
ON THE RECORD'ATTENTION: SCAMMEDS' being generated at all is a signal worth recording. It is not a word, and the only sense it carries is a label pinned on victims — in a piece whose entire subject is persuading victims not to stay silent. Whatever produced that option should be looked at, not just overridden.
ON THE RECORDOn the core sourced claims I have no substantive quarrel: the four attributed sentences track the harvested text closely and honestly, the limitations about the two empty rows are exactly the kind of disclosure I would otherwise be demanding, and the non-affiliation line is correctly placed. My objections are about the frame, the invented justifications, and the option lists — not about the reporting.
The sources
Official sourceDid you spot a scam? Here’s what to do next2026-08-28
An FTC consumer alert published 28 August 2026 states that many people experience fraud but never report it, and that reports filed at ReportFraud.ftc.gov enter the Consumer Sentinel Network for use by law enforcement and by FTC staff spotting patterns.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-08-28.
Limitation: The alert gives no report volumes, no case outcomes, no timeframes, and does not say a report leads to recovery of lost money.
Open the original source →Other checks
Published under standing founder pass (A9) — every claim source-mapped by the machine.
▼ What the machine checked
- ✓ Not a community submission.
- ✓ No entity is named.
- ✓ All 4 material sentence(s) map to FTC.
- ✗ groq returned "overstated"; openrouter raised 2 objection(s) — published on the receipt, not blocking (A9 amendment).
- ✓ No audience band is set.
No human affirmed these. They were verified by the classifier described in Amendment A9, on 2026-08-29.
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