Regarding posting personal information.

After a recent incident, I wanted to clear up exactly what our stance is regarding posting up a person’s private details on the site. It’ll be in two parts, to cover the person’s details and their images.

Firstly, regarding images. If an image is received from a scammer, we’ll post it up. If the image contains a child, we’ll obscure their face. If we can find the real person whose images are being abused by scammers, we’ll let them know and offer any help we can if they reply. We won’t post up any images that weren’t received from a scammer, even if there are others of that person available online. That’s important to us.

Sometimes we receive an email claiming to be a particular person/entity. Again, we’ll post it as is and try and let them know about the scammer abusing their name as part of their scheme. If the scammer mentions another person/entity partway through the scam (for example, telling the person to send money to them via Western Union, Moneygram etc.) then that simply gets posted up. Where it gets more tricky is when the scammer uses banking details that belong to someone else. Here’s how we deal with that. If the information is in the first email, then we post it as that’s the script hundreds or thousands of others would also have received. If however, a scammer shares banking information further into the script, then none of that will be shared with the public. We have contacts in various banks’ fraud departments that we send the information to, and leave them to deal with it.

So in a nutshell, we’ll post up images used by scammers, as well as emails/names where they pretend to be other people. Where we can, we’ll let the real people know about it. If a scammer mentions other organisations, then they sinply get posted with no further action taken. When it comes to bank details, if it’s in the initial email we’ll post it, but simply pass it on to the banking authorities if they arrive partway into the dialogue with the scammer. Hopefully that clears it up for everyone.