Editorial Standards
What we publish, what we refuse to publish, and what we will never claim. These are commitments, not aspirations.
1. Adverse findings rest on an official act
We report that a company or platform has been the subject of an official act — an indictment, an enforcement action, a court filing, a sanctions listing, an on-chain blacklisting, or a regulator’s published warning. We do not publish user reports, forum posts, review-site ratings or press allegations as findings of our own. Where those exist, they belong to whoever made them.
2. We report, we attribute, we link
Every item names its source, carries its date, and links to the original so you can read it yourself. We do not rewrite a source’s allegation into an assertion of ours, and that includes headlines. If a regulator says a firm is unauthorised, what we are telling you is that the regulator said it.
3. We name a person only when the official act is about them
Companies and platforms are named because official acts name them. A private individual is not named merely for appearing in a filing — an address in a document, a relative, a counterparty, an employee. But where a person is themselves the subject of the official act we are reporting, they are named, because the act names them and the report is unintelligible without it: a government that designates a named person publishes the name precisely so the public can avoid dealing with them. This rule was rewritten on 17 August 2026 because the site was breaking it. Publishing the OFAC sanctions records introduced 62 designated individuals across 428 addresses, and the previous wording — a flat refusal to name any private individual — described a site we no longer were. An external audit caught the contradiction. The honest fix was to state the distinction we were actually applying rather than to keep a rule the pages disproved; the alternative, deleting the designations, would have removed the primary-source record of an official act because our own wording was imprecise.
4. Right of reply before publication
Before we publish anything adverse about a named company, we offer them the opportunity to respond, and we publish the response alongside. If they decline or do not answer, we say so rather than implying agreement.
5. Corrections are public and dated
When we get something wrong we correct it on the corrections log, stating what it said before, what it says now, and why it changed. We do not quietly edit a page and leave no trace.
6. We will never tell you a platform is safe
You will not find the words safe, verified, trusted or approvedattached to any company on this site, and you will never see a green tick. We are not able to know that. A platform with nothing on the record today may be running a fraud today. Anyone who offers you a positive verdict on a cryptocurrency platform is selling you something — frequently the fraud itself.
7. Absence of a record is not a clean record
If we hold nothing about a company, that means no official act we monitor has named it. It does not mean the company is legitimate. Most frauds are unrecorded until after they have taken the money.
8. We take no money from anyone we write about
The site is free. It carries no cryptocurrency advertising, no affiliate links and no exchange sponsorship, and it will not in future. We do not accept payment for inclusion, for exclusion, or for placement.
9. We cannot recover your money and we will never offer to
No one on this site will contact you offering to trace or recover funds for a fee. If someone does so claiming to be us, they are not. Fraud operations routinely impersonate real firms, complete with correct logos and lookalike domains, and recovery fraud is the second wave that targets people who have already lost money.
10. Failures are shown, not hidden
When a source stops responding or goes quiet, we say so on the front page rather than quietly publishing less. A site that silently carries ten of fourteen sources while looking complete is lying by omission.
11. The ranking rule is published, not editorial
What sits at the top of the front page is decided by arithmetic we publish, so that you can disagree with it precisely rather than wonder. An official act scores 40 and a forensics report 10; the category scores between 4 and 22, with money actually recovered — seizures and freezes — at the top, because that is the rarest and most useful thing we carry; a figure printed in the source’s own headline adds up to 30 on a log scale, so the step from $1m to $10m counts for more than $500m to $510m; recency adds up to 18, and is one term among four rather than the whole sort. No source may take more than two of the five top slots. Nothing is scored by a model, no figure is ever computed or converted by us, and nobody can pay to move.
12. Every route we publish was fetched, and we grade how
The reporting routes, regulators and bar registers on this site carry a badge saying how each link was checked: Checked 4×/day where our own harvester requests that page four times a day, Page read where we fetched it and read the body, and Host live where the server answered but a bot wall stopped us reading — which proves the host is up and nothing else, in either direction. Anything we could not reach at all is not listed; there is a note in its place saying so. A dead official link is not a small failure on a site about fraud. It is exactly the gap an impersonator fills.
Edited by Raymond Clynick. If you believe something here is wrong, write to us and we will check it — see About for how to reach us.