About GACS — Independent public-benefit anti-fraud utility

GACS (Global Anti-Crime & Safety) is an independent public-benefit anti-fraud service run by a small team of engineers and researchers. We're funded by donations and optional monitoring plans — never by ads, brokers, banks, or platforms we may need to report on. If you're new here and want to know what the tool actually does, start at What is GACS? — this page is about who runs it and why.

Why we built this

Every day, ordinary people lose their life savings to scams that could have been spotted in seconds — if a free, trustworthy tool existed. Paid "recovery" services often re-victimize survivors. We built GACS so anyone, anywhere, can verify a wallet, website, broker, or Telegram handle in one click — without paying a cent or handing over access.

The scale of the problem is still accelerating. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission reported that consumers lost $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024 — a 25% jump in a single year — with investment scams alone accounting for $5.7 billion and imposter scams the most-reported category overall. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) logged $16.6 billion in reported losses in 2024, up 33% year over year, with cryptocurrency fraud representing $9.3 billion of that total. Adults over 60 reported nearly $4.8 billion in losses to IC3 — the demographic least able to recover financially and the one scammers target hardest. Sources: FTC fraud data and the IC3 2024 annual report.

Behind every one of those numbers is a specific, preventable moment: a text message that looked like a bank, a profile that looked like a friend, a website that looked like a store. In almost every case a 30-second check would have stopped it. That check is what GACS exists to make free, instant, and available to everyone — before the money moves, not after.

How we verify a report

Anyone can submit a scam report — anonymously, in under a minute. Before anything is published, our reviewers cross-check the submission against independent evidence: registration records for domains and wallets, platform profile history, screenshots and correspondence supplied by the reporter, and patterns we have already confirmed across other reports. Reports that cannot be corroborated are held, not published — an accusation alone is never enough to put a name, handle, or domain in the public registry.

When a report clears review we publish a permanent public warning page and notify everyone monitoring that identifier. If a listed party believes a listing is wrong, they can appeal it — every registry entry links to an appeal form, and verified owners are removed or corrected. Verification is a process, not a verdict we hand down once and forget.

How we're funded

GACS is supported by voluntary donations and optional paid services. We do not accept payments from exchanges, brokers, recovery firms, or any party we may report on. We will never monetize victims. Optional Shield & Vault monitoring plans for creators, families, and organizations fund the free public tools without selling data or diluting our public warnings.

Our principles

1. Victim safety first — always. When a design or business decision trades off against a potential victim's safety, safety wins. There is no revenue line that outranks it.
2. Core scam checks remain free for individuals. Checking a wallet, website, phone number, or social profile will never require payment. Optional monitoring plans for creators and families fund the mission — they add continuous protection, they don't gate the basics.
3. No conflicts of interest. We take no money from exchanges, brokers, recovery firms, or any party we may need to report on. No one can pay to be listed, delisted, or kept off the registry.
4. Open methodology. See how we verify scams — the signals, the weighting, and the review steps are published so anyone can check our work.
5. Transparency about what we know and don't know. When a lookup returns no record we say "no record found" — we never fill gaps with guesses, and we never present an unverified claim as fact.
6. A right of reply. Every public warning links to an appeal path. Being listed in our registry is a serious claim, and the accused get a real channel to contest it with evidence.

Contact

One inbox for everything — we route by category to the right team. No phone numbers (scammers spoof them and victims call thinking they’ve reached us).

Operating jurisdiction will be published alongside the any future charitable registration number once filed. Trust & safety details · Methodology