Scam advice should be
verifiable.
What this is
DecoySignal is a consumer-education channel about scams. It exists because too much scam advice is either too vague to use, "be careful online", or arrives after the money has already gone.
Most videos are built around an artifact you can see: a scam text, email, letter or recording. Sometimes that is the real thing — published by a federal agency, or submitted by a member of the public with permission. Sometimes it is a reconstruction we built from the tactics an agency documents, so that no real person's message has to be exposed. When it is a reconstruction, the screen says so, throughout. Either way we show it, isolate the giveaway, and give you one rule you can carry.
Not every video has an artifact, and it would be inaccurate to say otherwise. One format tests a familiar scam-safety belief — whether the padlock in a browser address bar proves a site is genuine, for instance — and another walks through what to do in the hours after money has already moved. Neither is built on a scam message. What every video does share is the evidence standard: a published, named source for every factual claim, cited on screen while the claim is being made.
Why there is nobody on camera
Deliberately. The subject of a video is the evidence, not a presenter. A face on screen competes with the artifact for attention, and it invites you to trust a person rather than check a source.
There is no on-camera host, no AI-generated presenter, and no fictional expert. The narration is a licensed synthetic voice reading scripts reviewed and approved by a human before publication. That voice is not given a name, a biography, or credentials, because it does not have any. It represents an editorial process, not a person.
Who is behind it
DecoySignal is operated by DecoySignal, LLC, a single-member company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any government agency, bank, or law-enforcement body. When we cite one, we cite it as a source and say so on screen.
We are not investigators, not attorneys, and not financial advisers, and we do not present ourselves as any of those. We read public records carefully and explain them plainly.
What we will not do
- We will not explain how to run a scam. Every video is written so that it helps a target and is useless to an operator.
- We will not mock victims, or the people doing this. No accents, no impressions, no scam-baiting. It teaches the wrong lesson: a convincing scam can sound exactly like your bank.
- We never present an invented detail as a fact about a real victim or a real case. Where a message is rebuilt from documented tactics, it is labeled a reconstruction on screen, and any amount inside it is illustrative — not a claim that this happened to someone.
- We will not tell you we can get your money back. Your own bank, card issuer or payment provider may well decide a dispute in your favor — that is a real process. But someone who approaches you out of the blue guaranteeing recovery, especially for a fee up front, is running the second scam. If that approach claims to come from us, in our comments or anywhere else, it did not.
How to reach us
General contact: service@decoysignal.com
Send us a scam: read how to do it safely first
Corrections: see the corrections log.