Two things were taken. Only one of them has a form.

Two losses, not one

Begin by separating the two things that happened, because almost everybody reading this has them fused into a single catastrophe and the fusing is doing real damage.

One loss is money. It has a figure, a date, a bank, an account at the other end, and a route by which it is reported. It is the loss everybody around you will ask about and the only one that appears in anything written on this subject.

The other loss is what happened to how you see yourself, and it has none of those things. No figure, no form, nobody to report it to, and nothing written about it anywhere.

One has a form and a clock

Take the money first, briefly, because it belongs on a different page and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

It runs on hours. There is a sequence, it is well established, and acting inside the first day is worth more than everything else combined. The whole of it — where the money goes, which channel, what a freeze does and does not mean, why partial and immediate beats complete and late — is set out in our financial fraud guidance, which exists for exactly this.

If that has not been done, it is the only thing worth doing today. Stop here and come back.

The other has neither

And the second loss has no clock at all, which sounds like relief and is actually the problem.

Nothing about it gets worse by being dealt with in three weeks rather than three days. The messages will still exist. The content route will still be open. The record can be built whenever you are able to sit with it.

Which means nothing forces it to happen, and so for a great many people it simply does not — and they carry it, undealt with, for years, while the part that had a form got dealt with inside a day.

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Why people mix them up

The mixing happens for an understandable reason and it happens in the first forty-eight hours, which is exactly when it costs the most.

Somebody who has just worked out what has happened does not experience two losses. They experience one enormous event, and their instinct is to gather everything about it — all the messages, every photograph, the whole nine months — before telling anybody anything.

That instinct is entirely reasonable and it is pointed at the wrong task. The thing with a deadline needed a transaction reference and a phone call. The thing that needed nine months of messages had no deadline at all.

The hours spent wrongly

So the pattern we see, and it has been described to us enough times that we can set it out in advance.

The first two days go into assembling the emotional record — reading, screenshotting, going back over things, trying to find the moment it started. Necessary work, eventually. Not the work of those two days.

And then the opposite happens. Having spent the urgent hours on the part that could wait, people spend the weeks that follow unable to face the part they already assembled. The file sits there. Nothing is submitted. We have had people come to us four months later with a complete set of screenshots and no complaint filed anywhere.

So money first, then this

Which gives the only ordering instruction on this page, and it is deliberately blunt.

Report the payment. Not a perfect report — the amounts you can remember, the dates roughly, the account you sent from. Something rough filed this afternoon beats something thorough filed at the weekend, and that is not a general principle about paperwork, it is specific to how the money moves.

Then stop. Everything else on this page is for afterwards.

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And this page will wait

And we mean that in a way guides do not usually mean things.

There is no advantage anywhere in this page to reading it this evening rather than next month. Nothing expires. Nobody is counting. The content route does not close, the record does not degrade, and the complaint does not become harder to write.

If you are three weeks in and have not been able to do any of it, you have not missed anything — which is worth hearing from somebody, because the feeling of having wasted weeks is one of the things people arrive carrying.

Your side was real

Now the part of this page that matters most, and it is not procedural at all.

You are being handed a story about yourself in which you were taken in. Everybody who hears about this will offer you some version of it, kindly or otherwise, and you will have constructed a harsher version of your own by the second week.

That story is wrong on the facts, and the correction is not reassurance. It is simply more accurate than the story you are carrying.

The months actually happened

Start with the plainest thing, which is also the thing people dismiss fastest.

The conversations were conversations. You said what you thought, you heard answers, you adjusted plans, you looked forward to things. None of that was performed by you. Months of a person’s actual life went into it and those months were not hypothetical.

It was not a fake relationship. It was a real relationship with a fabricated person on one side of it.

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The feeling was accurate

And this is the piece that people argue with hardest, so we will put it carefully.

What you felt was a correct response to the information you had. Somebody attentive, consistent, interested, available. Given that input, attachment is the appropriate output — it is what the system is for. Feeling it was not a malfunction; it was the machinery working properly on a corrupted input.

Which is a different proposition from “it was not your fault”, and a more useful one. Nobody believes the second thing when they are told it. The first is just a description of what occurred.

Only one was invented

So the asymmetry, stated as directly as we can.

There were two people in that exchange. One was being presented and the other was present. Every word you sent was yours. Perhaps half of what came back was constructed, and you have no way of knowing which half, which is part of what makes this so difficult to put down.

But your half is not in question. It never was, and nothing that has been discovered since changes a single thing about it.

Why you cannot imagine it

Which brings us to the question people actually ask us, usually in the first five minutes, and almost never as a question about procedure.

How does a person do this for nine months?

And the honest answer is that we do not know, and that your inability to understand it is not a gap in your knowledge. You are trying to model it by imagining yourself doing it, which is the only method any of us has, and it fails because you could not. That failure is information about you rather than about them.

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Which is why you did not see

And the same mechanism explains the thing you are blaming yourself for.

You did not spot it for the same reason you cannot imagine it. Sustained, patient, entirely deliberate deception over months is outside the range of behaviour that ordinary people are built to anticipate, because almost nobody does it and nothing in anybody’s life trains them to watch for it.

There is a particular version of this that people carry very badly: the moment somebody else was involved and also did not notice. A brother who spoke to him on the phone. A friend who saw the photographs. People remember that afterwards as proof that the signs were there and they ignored them. It is the opposite. It is a measure of how much work was done.

The two tasks that do not fit

Which brings us to why this particular week is harder than it looks from outside.

You have two jobs in front of you and they require opposite things from the same person. Nobody has pointed that out, so people assume the difficulty is a failing of their own.

It is not a failing. The two jobs are genuinely incompatible, and nobody does both of them well at once.

Grieving and complaining

Set them side by side and the problem becomes obvious.

Nobody can hold both columns at once. So people swing between them — two days here, two days there, nothing finished in either column, and that swinging is where almost everybody is sitting on the day they first email.

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And the freezing between

And the oscillating resolves, for a lot of people, into doing nothing at all for a surprisingly long time.

Not because they do not care about the money, and not out of denial. Because every attempt to work on the paperwork requires re-entering the messages, and re-entering the messages puts them back into the other column, and then the afternoon is gone.

This is the single commonest reason the non-financial side never gets dealt with, and it is a completely mechanical problem rather than an emotional one, which means it has a mechanical solution: somebody else goes through the messages.

It is not a character flaw

Which is the whole point of spending four sections on something that looks like feelings rather than documentation.

People arrive at this desk apologising. For having taken three months to come. For not having a proper list. For crying on the phone. For not being able to say the amount out loud.

None of that requires an apology and none of it is unusual. The reason it takes people months to get to this is structural rather than personal, and knowing that it is structural is, in our experience, the thing that lets somebody finally start.

There is one more thing worth saying about the apologising, because it points at something practical. People apologise to us for the state of their records — nothing in order, nothing listed, amounts they are not sure about, dates they would have to go and check. They say it as though it disqualifies them from being helped. It is the opposite: a person who arrives with a tidy schedule of their own losses has usually spent three weekends building it alone, and those weekends were the expensive part. Come with nothing. The disordered version is what we are for, and the assembling is quicker done once by somebody outside it than three times by somebody inside it.

The secrecy was arranged

Now the part people are most ashamed of, and the part that was least their own doing.

Almost everybody we speak to has kept this from their family, usually from the beginning and usually at the other person’s suggestion. By the time money has gone, they are not only dealing with the loss but with having concealed the whole thing from the people who would have asked questions.

That concealment was not your idea and it was not an accident. It was the first thing arranged, before anything was ever asked for.

Do not tell anyone yet

The sentence itself is worth looking at, because it arrives early and it never arrives as an instruction.

It comes wrapped in something reasonable. Let us be sure first. Your family will not understand yet. People complicate things. I do not want them judging you before they know me. Let us tell them together, when we meet.

Every one of those sounds like consideration, and that is the whole of why it works. Nobody agrees to be isolated; people agree to be careful.

Came first, not last

And the timing is the thing that gives it away, which is only visible afterwards.

It arrives before any money is mentioned. Often weeks before, sometimes months. At the point it is suggested there is nothing to protect and no reason for anybody to be cautious about anything, which is precisely why it does not register as odd.

Nothing had happened yet. That is the point. The ground was being prepared before anything was put on it.

It removed the witnesses

Because of what the family would have done, which is the only reason any of it mattered.

A mother asks the questions you would not think to ask. A brother wants to know why somebody who works abroad cannot do a video call. A friend says plainly that it sounds strange. None of them is cleverer than you; they are simply standing outside it, which is the one position you could not occupy.

Removing them did not make you easier to deceive. It removed the people who were not being deceived at all.

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So the silence is not yours

Which matters for a reason beyond making anybody feel better about it.

People in this position carry the secrecy as the proof that they knew something was wrong. The reasoning runs: if it had been above board I would have told my mother, so some part of me must have known. That reasoning is backwards and it is the single most damaging thing people conclude about themselves here.

You did not hide it because you suspected. You hid it because you were asked to, early, by somebody you trusted, for reasons that sounded like care. The suspicion came much later and the silence was already in place by then — which is exactly the order it was designed to happen in.

One more observation about the silence, offered because people find it useful rather than because it changes anything. In almost every account we hear, the request for secrecy was framed as being for the other person’s protection rather than yours — they did not want to be judged, they did not want to meet your family as a stranger, they wanted to prove themselves first. That framing is what makes it impossible to refuse, because refusing it looks like a failure of loyalty at exactly the point where somebody is trying to establish that there is some. Nobody declines that request. It is not designed to be declined.

Who to tell first, and why

And so the practical question, which is a harder one than people expect and which is usually answered badly.

Everybody has to tell somebody eventually, and most people put it off not because of the money but because of the three weeks of not having mentioned it. The longer that runs, the more there is to explain.

The choice of first person matters more than the timing does, and almost everybody chooses wrongly for a very understandable reason.

Usefulness, not kindness

Here is the suggestion, and it will sound cold until the reason is given.

Choose whoever will be least shocked and most practical. Not whoever loves you most.

The person who loves you most will be upset, and their being upset becomes a second thing you now have to manage on the worst evening of the year. You are not looking for comfort in that first conversation; you are looking for somebody to be in it with you, and those are different people in most families.

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The person who will not gasp

And there is usually one, identifiable in advance if you think about who it is rather than who you wish it were.

Somebody who has dealt with a bank before. Somebody who was ill and dealt with it flatly. The relative who is a little remote and rather good in a crisis. The friend who does not moralise. Frequently somebody slightly further out than the obvious choice.

And one specific suggestion. If a family member spoke to this person at any point — on the phone, on a call, by message — they are often the easiest conversation you will have, because they did not see it either and they know it.

And who holds the paperwork

Then a second role, which is a different job and does not have to be the same person.

Somebody has to hold the record — the messages, the payment particulars, the complaint, the replies. It wants somebody who can open a file without the contents landing on them, and it wants somebody who is not going to put it in front of you at dinner.

That is the job to hand away, and handing it away is not avoidance. Re-reading nine months of this, alone, in the evenings, is not courage and it is not required of anybody. Somebody else can read it, including us.

The thing we will not do

Now a refusal we hold absolutely, and which we would rather explain than simply state.

It is the thing people most want and it is almost always the first question. Not the money, not the complaint — who was he. There are photographs, there are nine months of messages, there is a voice on recordings, and the question feels answerable.

We will not go anywhere near it.

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We do not identify anybody

Set down openly, so that the question need only be asked once and no one reads the answer as being about them.

Establishing who somebody was is not work we take on, in any form. Not the photographs against anything, not a number, not a profile, not an account, and not by lending a hand to somebody doing it themselves. An instruction worded to get around that is still the same instruction and gets the same answer — from anybody who asks us, on any facts, at any point.

Or say how it might be done

And the refusal extends past the work to the information, which is the part that feels excessive until the reason is set out.

What might be checked, what somebody with time on their hands could try, what is even feasible — none of that gets described either. Not over a phone call, not as background, not offered quietly to a person whose situation we have no doubt about whatsoever.

Something explained once cannot be explained only to the right person.

Because a request is words

And the explanation lies with a reader we are not picturing when we picture you.

Nearly everybody who asks us this is exactly what they appear to be: somebody three weeks into the worst thing that has happened to them in years, holding a phone full of a relationship that was not real. We believe them, and we have no reason not to.

Yet what reaches us is only language on a screen. Put side by side, the account of a person who was defrauded and the account of a person somebody walked away from read exactly alike — both describe months of closeness, both have photographs, both have messages, and both want to know who the person really is.

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And we cannot tell them apart

Which is the whole of it, and we are not going to dress it up.

Nobody can reliably tell those two apart from outside, and the cost of being wrong once is not a bad afternoon for us — it is a person located who had arranged not to be. So the answer is no for everybody, including the great majority who deserve better than a flat refusal.

None of this reflects any doubt about you, and it does not bend for a case that persuades us, since a case as told always persuades. It also does not shift under pressure — not for someone in pieces, not for someone in a hurry, and not for a careful account of why these particular circumstances fall outside what we must have had in mind.

But also: it would not help

And there is a second reason, entirely separate from the first, which we think is the more useful one for the person actually asking.

It would not get you anything. That is not a consolation offered to soften a refusal; it is the honest position, and people are genuinely surprised by it because the belief runs the other way so strongly.

Everything that can actually be done here proceeds without a name. The report, the bank, the content route, the account, the record — none of it waits on identity, and none of it works better with one.

A name changes nothing

Be concrete about that, because it is the step people do not take.

Suppose you had it tomorrow — a real name, a real place. Money is still gone to accounts that were emptied. The content route is the same route. The complaint says the same things. What you would have is an answer to a question, and the question is not the obstacle.

What people actually want from the name is not progress. It is an explanation — a way of making nine months make sense. That is a completely legitimate thing to want and it is not available from a name, because the name would not tell you why.

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And looking is re-entry

And the last reason, which is the one we would press hardest on somebody determined to do this themselves.

Looking is not a passive activity. Searching a number, visiting a profile, messaging an account, asking a mutual contact, putting a photograph somewhere to see what comes back — every one of those is a signal, and some of them are visible from the other side.

The most dangerous week in this whole situation is the week somebody decides to find out for themselves. It restarts contact without intending to, it announces that you are still engaged with it, and it marks you as somebody who is still reachable — which is the one thing worth avoiding.

Do not go back for an explanation

Which brings us to the one instruction on this page that we would give to everybody, with no qualification and no exception.

Do not message him. Not on a number that may still deliver, not on a profile you come across, not through a mutual contact, and not to say that you know.

There is no version of that conversation that leaves you better off than you are this morning. We say it knowing it is the least satisfying sentence in this guide.

The strongest impulse there is

And we are not pretending it is an easy instruction, because of all the things people want in this situation, this is the one they want most.

Not the money. The money is understood to be gone. What people want is an explanation — was any of it real, did you ever mean any of it, how could you do this for nine months. The questions are reasonable and the wanting is reasonable.

The difficulty is that the only person who could answer is the one person whose answer would be worth nothing.

It restarts contact

Take the practical consequences one at a time, because the emotional argument never persuades anybody and the practical one sometimes does.

A message is a channel reopened. Not a question asked into silence — an indication, from you, that this is live, that you are still thinking about it, and that you can still be reached. Whatever had gone quiet is now not quiet.

And a channel is much easier to open than to close again, which is something people discover afterwards rather than before.

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It tells them what you know

Then the second consequence, which matters if anything is ever to be done about any of this.

A message saying you have worked out what happened is information handed over. What you have understood, what you have not, whether you have reported it, what you have kept, how far along you are.

We are not going to speculate about what anybody does with that, because we do not know and a confident account would be invention. What we can say is that it is information you currently hold and they do not, and there is no circumstance in which giving it away improves your position.

And the second approach

And the third consequence, which is the one worth being warned about in advance because it arrives with its own kindness.

Having established that you are reachable and distressed, there is an opening for something new. Not a continuation of the first thing — a fresh approach, from somebody apparently unconnected, arriving at exactly the moment you most want help.

This happens to people who never went back as well, which is why it belongs on this page rather than only in the warnings about contact.

The one offering it back

It takes a small number of recognisable forms and it is worth knowing them before one arrives.

Somebody presenting themselves as a recovery service. Somebody claiming to be an officer with news about your case. Somebody who says they were defrauded too and have found a way. A lawyer offering to act for a fee. Occasionally the original person, apologising, offering to repay, asking for something small first.

Every one of them asks for a payment at some point, and the ask is always modest relative to what was lost. The whole of what makes this work is that it is addressed to somebody who has already proved they pay. The detail of how these go is dealt with alongside the first loss in our financial fraud guidance.

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Why you, in particular

Which is worth one plain paragraph, because people take the second approach personally in a way that adds to everything else.

It is not about you. Somebody who has paid once is a better prospect than somebody who has not, and that is the entire reasoning. It is not a judgement about how gullible anybody is and it does not mean you have been marked out.

Which also gives you a clean rule that needs no judgement at all: nobody who genuinely has news for you needs a payment from you first. That one sentence handles every version of this, and it means you never have to assess whether a particular approach is honest.

What was shared willingly

Now a subject we are going to handle carefully, and we will say at the outset what we are not going to do with it.

Many people in this situation shared photographs or other content over months, because that is what people in relationships do. Some are now carrying that as a separate and worse weight than the money.

Nothing shared willingly stops being worth protecting. That is our whole position and we are not going to qualify it, soften it, or follow it with anything beginning “although”.

There is a route for content

And the first useful thing is simply that a route exists, which a surprising number of people do not know.

Content that is yours and is somewhere it should not be can be dealt with. It is a separate process from the money and from the complaint, it runs on its own, and it is handled as our takedown work.

It is a procedure rather than a favour. Nobody is being asked to be understanding about your circumstances.

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It costs nothing

And the second thing, which matters because of who is reading this.

The route itself is free. Somebody who has just lost eleven lakh and is lying awake about whether anything can be done does not need to also wonder whether they can afford to find out. They cannot be charged for it and nothing about it depends on money.

We charge for preparing things properly where somebody wants that done rather than doing it themselves. The route is open either way, and if what you need from this page is that one fact, take it and go.

And needs nobody’s goodwill

The third thing is about what it does not require, and this is the part that frees people.

It does not require the other person’s cooperation. It does not require knowing who they are. It does not require a police outcome first, a court finding, or anybody agreeing that you were wronged.

Which means the content is the one part of this that moves without reference to the person who caused it — the only piece of the whole situation where that is true, and worth knowing for exactly that reason.

No judgement is being made

And then the thing we would want said out loud, because it is what stops people asking.

Nobody at this desk thinks you should not have sent anything. You were in what you understood to be a relationship and you behaved as people in relationships behave, which is to say normally. Anybody treating that as the error has mistaken what happened here.

We mention it because people conduct this conversation with us in a whisper, or lead with an apology, or raise it in the fourth call having decided three times not to. There is nothing here to be embarrassed about in front of us, and we would rather be told in the first conversation than find out late and have been working from an incomplete picture.

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If there is a threat

One situation needs separating out, because it is a different thing and should not be handled from a web page.

If somebody is threatening to send content to your family, your employer or anybody else, the subject has moved past paperwork. Get proper advice the same day, not later in the week — an advocate, and the police side through our guidance on having information recorded.

Three things, and they are the only general things worth saying. Do not pay. Do not negotiate. Do not answer a deadline. Beyond those, what should be done depends on facts we do not have, and anybody giving you a confident plan without them is guessing with your life.

There is a version of the threat situation that we are asked about often enough to address here. People want to know whether paying once would end it. We are not going to give you a prediction about somebody we know nothing about, and anybody who does is inventing. What we can tell you is the structural point, which is the same one that runs through the second approach above: a payment establishes that payments are available. Everything on this page about why you in particular were approached a second time applies with more force here. That is not a guarantee about what would follow and it is not offered as one; it is the only honest thing that can be said from this distance, and it is the reason the three instructions above are the three we give.

What else they may have taken

Now a practical review that is worth doing calmly, once, with somebody else present.

The money is the loss everybody counts. But months of ordinary daily conversation contains a great deal that was never thought of as sensitive at the time it was sent, and it is worth knowing what is out there rather than discovering it later.

This is a checking exercise, not a reason to be frightened. Most people find one or two items and are relieved; a few find something that needs attention, and finding it now is far better than finding it in a year.

Months of ordinary talk

What to look for, as a short list rather than a long one.

Do the list with somebody else holding the phone. The point of the second person is not the reading; it is that the exercise ends after an hour rather than turning into an evening.

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Go through it with somebody

Which is the general form of the only practical advice we have about the messages themselves.

Two instructions that sound contradictory and are not. Do not delete anything. And do not sit alone re-reading it. The record matters and your evenings matter, and both can be had by handing the whole thing to one person once.

Where that person is us, this is most of what we do. Where it is a relative, give them the task properly — dates, payments, what was asked for, what was sent — rather than asking them to read it and tell you what they think. The second version helps nobody and hurts both of you.

And whether it comes back

Now the question everybody arrives with and the one we are most careful about answering.

We will not tell you it is likely, and we will not tell you it is impossible either, because both would be false comfort of different kinds.

Some of it is recovered where a report reached a bank very quickly. That is a real outcome and not a theoretical one. It is not the common outcome and nobody honest will promise it to you.

Usually it does not

And the honest general position, said once so that nobody has to read between any lines.

In most cases the money does not come back. We would rather be the ones who told you than have you find out slowly over six months of hoping, because the slow version does more damage than the plain one.

Which is also why we will not sell you anything on the basis that it improves your chances of recovery. Our work here is a record and a complaint, properly made. It is worth having for reasons we set out below, and none of those reasons is that it will get your money back.

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And one practical note about the hoping, because it does its own damage. People in this position often keep a part of their week aimed at recovery — checking, following up, asking, waiting on a call. We are not going to tell anybody to abandon that, and some of it is simply the follow-up that any complaint needs. What we would say is to give it a fixed and small shape: a written follow-up on a decided day, by somebody who is not you if possible, and nothing the rest of the week. Open-ended hoping is not persistence and it does not improve any outcome; what it does is keep the whole thing live every single day, which is the thing you are trying to come out of.

So why report at all

Which is a fair question once the honest answer about recovery has been given, and there are three reasons that hold whatever happens to the money.

The first is simply that it is the only route by which anything is ever returned. A low chance is not no chance, and it is zero without a report.

The second is that a record exists afterwards, and people need it for things they cannot anticipate now — explaining a withdrawn deposit, an account, a gap, a transaction somebody queries years later. The third is the one that moves most of the people we deal with: this was done to several people and not only to you, and a report is the only thing any of them contributes to the position of the others.

How people reach us

Our own part in this, honestly, beginning with who is on the other side of the call.

Three kinds of person, and they arrive at very different stages. Somebody three or four days in, who has reported the money and cannot think. Somebody three or four months in, with a complete set of screenshots and nothing filed anywhere. And a parent, a sibling or a child, writing about somebody else — sometimes about somebody who is still in the middle of it.

The second group apologise most and need it least. Taking four months to be able to look at this is not a failure of will; it is what the two incompatible tasks described earlier on this page actually produce in practice.

What we prepare, in order

And what we actually do, which is less dramatic than people hope and more useful than they expect.

A dated account of what happened, in sequence, in plain language. The messages arranged usefully rather than chronologically — what was asked for and when, separated from everything else. A record of what was sent, what was taken, and what was signed. Then a written complaint that reads as a record rather than a confession, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

And then the content route separately, and the follow-ups in writing rather than by phone, because a written follow-up leaves something behind and a phone call leaves nothing. None of it is difficult work. What it is, is work somebody else can do, which is the entire point.

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The person we will not name

And one specific thing we decline, restated here because it is the first thing almost everybody asks and we would rather it be answered twice than once.

We do not establish who he was. We do not check the photographs against anything, look into a number or a profile, or describe how any of that might be attempted. Not for you, not for a family, and not for a case we are entirely satisfied about.

The reasons are set out at length further up this page rather than hidden in a line of small print, because somebody who has been refused something deserves to know why rather than simply to be told no.

Where our side ends

The limits, collected in one place rather than discovered one at a time.

The record, the written complaint, the content route, the review of what else was taken, and the follow-ups — those are the pieces we carry, and we put ourselves forward for nothing further. The financial side and everything with a clock on it belongs to our financial fraud guidance, which is a different piece of work on a different timetable.

Outside that circle: a matter travelling to an authority or a courtroom, somebody standing up on your behalf, a threat aimed at you, and any prediction about what becomes of a complaint once lodged. An advocate holds the first three. The fourth is held by nobody honestly. And the moment a thing turns into a fight, we withdraw — stated up front, never discovered by a client in week three.

What we never say

And the things you will not hear from us, listed because people in this position are sometimes told them by somebody.

That your money is likely to come back. That knowing who he was would change anything. That a particular authority will act. That there is a quicker route if you know the right person. That content can be guaranteed to disappear everywhere. And we will never suggest that any part of this happened because of something you did.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it

Read that as written. It holds across this whole site and it holds here.

Should a question have an answer that is somebody else’s to give, you get their name from us and nothing more. That leaves everybody dissatisfied, and it is the reason this desk is of any use at all.

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Our charge on this

In the open, the way the rest of this website handles money.

Our fee for Matrimonial / Dating App Fraud comes to ₹3,499. We reckon on 7 – 30 days for it.

Two things belong beside that figure. Nothing is payable to anybody for making a report of any kind — if a sum is ever asked of you for one, at a counter or over a phone, that is not a fee, and we say it because somebody in this position is in no state to argue about it. And our charge is for preparing the record and the complaint; it buys careful paperwork and somebody else reading nine months of messages so that you do not have to. It does not buy an outcome, and anybody selling you one is selling the second approach.

And one thing, today

A closing word, and it is the shortest list on this page.

If the money has not been reported, report it — that and nothing else. If it has, then today has exactly one item on it, and it is not paperwork: tell one person. Chosen for usefulness rather than fondness, once, with the facts and without the apology.

Everything else here can be done next week or next month by you or by us, and none of it gets harder for waiting. The only thing that is costing you something every day is being alone with it, and that is the one part nobody can do on your behalf.

Questions people actually ask