Secret Checking — Secret checking is the concealed review of messages, profiles, blocked accounts, or information connected with the criminal. A victim hides the behavior because of shame, fear of judgment, or concern that others will interpret it as continuing attachment. Secrecy preserves the habit and prevents honest discussion with a therapist or support provider. — Recovery Challenge
Added September 27, 2026
Is a publication of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. [dba SCARS & SCARS Institute]
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Copyright © 2015-2026 Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
PLEASE NOTE: Psychology Clarification
The following specific modalities within the practice of psychology are restricted to psychologists appropriately trained in the use of such modalities:
Diagnosis: The diagnosis of mental, emotional, or brain disorders and related behaviors.
Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis is a type of therapy that focuses on helping individuals to understand and resolve unconscious conflicts.
Hypnosis: Hypnosis is a state of trance in which individuals are more susceptible to suggestion. It can be used to treat a variety of conditions, including anxiety, depression, and pain.
Biofeedback: Biofeedback is a type of therapy that teaches individuals to control their bodily functions, such as heart rate and blood pressure. It can be used to treat a variety of conditions, including stress, anxiety, and pain.
Behavioral analysis: Behavioral analysis is a type of therapy that focuses on changing individuals’ behaviors. It is often used to treat conditions such as autism and ADHD.
Neuropsychology: Neuropsychology is a type of psychology that focuses on the relationship between the brain and behavior. It is often used to assess and treat cognitive impairments caused by brain injuries or diseases.
SCARS and the members of the SCARS Team do not engage in any of the above modalities in relationship to scam victims. SCARS is not a mental healthcare provider and recognizes the importance of professionalism and separation between its work and that of the licensed practice of psychology.
SCARS is an educational provider of generalized self-help information that individuals can use for their own benefit to achieve their own goals related to emotional trauma. SCARS recommends that all scam victims see professional counselors or therapists to help them determine the suitability of any specific information or practices that may help them.
SCARS cannot diagnose or treat any individuals, nor can it state the effectiveness of any educational information that it may provide, regardless of its experience in interacting with traumatized scam victims over time. All information that SCARS provides is purely for general educational purposes to help scam victims become aware of and better understand the topics and to be able to dialog with their counselors or therapists.
It is important that all readers understand these distinctions and that they apply the information that SCARS may publish at their own risk, and should do so only after consulting a licensed psychologist or mental healthcare provider.
Opinions
The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. The author is solely responsible for the content of their work. SCARS is protected under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) section 230 from liability.
Disclaimer:
SCARS IS A DIGITAL PUBLISHER AND DOES NOT OFFER HEALTH OR MEDICAL ADVICE, LEGAL ADVICE, FINANCIAL ADVICE, OR SERVICES THAT SCARS IS NOT LICENSED OR REGISTERED TO PERFORM.
IF YOU’RE FACING A MEDICAL EMERGENCY, CALL YOUR LOCAL EMERGENCY SERVICES IMMEDIATELY, OR VISIT THE NEAREST EMERGENCY ROOM OR URGENT CARE CENTER. YOU SHOULD CONSULT YOUR HEALTHCARE PROVIDER BEFORE FOLLOWING ANY MEDICALLY RELATED INFORMATION PRESENTED ON OUR PAGES.
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SCARS IS NOT A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR – WE DO NOT PROVIDE INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES FOR INDIVIDUALS OR BUSINESSES. ANY INVESTIGATIONS THAT SCARS MAY PERFORM IS NOT A SERVICE PROVIDED TO THIRD-PARTIES. INFORMATION REPORTED TO SCARS MAY BE FORWARDED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AS SCARS SEE FIT AND APPROPRIATE.
This content and other material contained on the website, apps, newsletter, and products (“Content”), is general in nature and for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal, or financial advice; the Content is not intended to be a substitute for licensed or regulated professional advice. Always consult your doctor or other qualified healthcare provider, lawyer, financial, or tax professional with any questions you may have regarding the educational information contained herein. SCARS makes no guarantees about the efficacy of information described on or in SCARS’ Content. The information contained is subject to change and is not intended to cover all possible situations or effects. SCARS does not recommend or endorse any specific professional or care provider, product, service, or other information that may be mentioned in SCARS’ websites, apps, and Content unless explicitly identified as such.
The disclaimers herein are provided on this page for ease of reference. These disclaimers supplement and are a part of SCARS’ website’s Terms of Use.
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All original content is copyrighted © 1991 – 2026 Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. (Registered DBA “SCARS”, and informal DBA “SCARS Institute”) All Rights Reserved Worldwide & Webwide. Third-party copyrights acknowledged.
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Contact the legal department for the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Incorporated by email at legal@AgainstScams.org
SCARS INSTITUTE LEGAL NOTICE
Per the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, now creates specific transparency requirements for certain AI-generated and AI-manipulated content.
In compliance thereof:
The Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc., dba SCARS Institute, uses generative AI in the creation process for some of our content, including: supporting scientific research, grammar and spelling correction, and original image creation as defined by and modified by a human graphic artist. In addition, we use generative AI to take human-written lyrics, scripts, and explicit direction to create songs and music, and other media. All of which is drafted, reviewed, edited, approved, and published by our human team.
SCARS Institute™
Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
August 5, 2026
The SCARS Institute writers use artificial intelligence as one of several tools in the preparation, research, review, and production of educational material. AI does not replace our writers, editors, subject matter experts, researchers, or human judgment. People write, review, revise, approve, and publish our work.
Because of the way we write, some AI writing detectors can produce false positives and label human-written or heavily human-edited material as AI-generated. Those results should be treated with caution.
One reason is our writing style.
SCARS Institute material is written for people who have experienced trauma, fraud, betrayal, grief, shame, confusion, and other forms of emotional distress. That changes how we structure information. We use clear lead-ins, repeated concepts, section breaks, restatement of difficult ideas, and deliberate reinforcement of major points. We do this because a traumatized reader can struggle with concentration, working memory, attention, information retention, and cognitive overload. A sentence that seems repetitive to a casual reader can help someone under stress understand and remember the point being made.
Our writing is also highly structured. We have people on our team who were trained in older newspaper writing, technical writing, educational writing, and writing designed for high comprehension. We use established editorial practices drawn from sources such as The Chicago Manual of Style and The Yahoo! Style Guide, along with our own editorial rules developed for victim education.
There is an irony in that. Modern AI systems were trained on large amounts of professional writing produced in many of these same styles. Clean grammar, orderly paragraph structure, consistent terminology, repeated explanation, clear sectioning, and formal editorial discipline can all resemble the patterns that AI detectors associate with machine-generated text.
That does not mean the text was written by AI.
AI writing detectors do not determine authorship. They estimate patterns. Those patterns can appear in AI-generated writing, human writing, professionally edited writing, academic writing, technical writing, legal writing, journalism, and highly structured educational material. A detector can flag human work because the prose is regular, grammatical, repetitive by design, or tightly organized. It can also fail to flag text that was produced with extensive AI assistance.
We do use AI in our editorial process.
Our team can use AI to help locate research, compare sources, identify missing questions, test possible ways of framing a subject, organize complex material, check structure, review grammar and spelling, identify unclear passages, and help us see where an explanation needs more work. AI can also help with proofreading and consistency across long educational materials.
Those functions are similar to using search tools, grammar checkers, reference software, editorial software, dictionaries, style guides, and research databases. The tool can assist the work. It does not carry responsibility for the finished publication.
Our human team does.
Our writers write every article or story. Every SCARS Institute publication goes through human review and editing. We decide what belongs in the material, what does not, what claims require support, what wording is appropriate for traumatized readers, what examples are responsible, and whether the final work reflects our standards. We reject suggestions that do not meet those standards. We rewrite material when it does not sound like us, does not fit the subject, or does not serve the people we are trying to help.
We also maintain a consistent page structure in each our websites, which can be different in each website. Headings, section order, terminology, metadata, internal links, explanatory blocks, and other page elements follow patterns that help readers find information and help search engines and AI systems understand what each page is about. That structure is deliberate. We want a scam victim searching for a specific problem to find the right material, and we want machines indexing our sites to understand the subject accurately enough to present it when someone asks for help.
This can make our pages look even more regular to automated detection systems.
We are not interested in disguising our use of AI, and we are not interested in pretending that modern publishing happens without digital tools. We are interested in producing accurate, readable, responsible material for people who need it.
AI assists parts of that work.
Humans remain responsible for the writing, the judgment, the editing, and the final publication.
SCARS Institute Team
## Copyright, Fair Use, Evidence, and Public-Interest Notice
The SCARS Institute, operated by the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc., is a United States-registered nonprofit organization dedicated to scam victim education, support, research, advocacy, crime prevention, criminology, victimology, and public awareness. SCARS Institute recognizes and respects the intellectual property rights of copyright holders. Under United States copyright law, the doctrine of Fair Use permits limited use of copyrighted material without prior authorization for purposes including criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair Use is evaluated according to the circumstances of each use, including the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality used, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the original work.
All such uses by SCARS Institute are undertaken exclusively for nonprofit, noncommercial, educational, research, documentary, analytical, evidentiary, advocacy, crime-prevention, or public-interest purposes. SCARS Institute does not commercially exploit third-party copyrighted material and receives no direct financial benefit from its inclusion or display. Third-party photographs, screenshots, documents, messages, profiles, graphics, or other materials are not used as commercial products, licensed for profit, used to imply endorsement, or displayed for the purpose of generating commercial value from the original work. Their use serves the nonprofit educational, research, crime-prevention, evidentiary, and public-interest mission of SCARS Institute.
The Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. is organized and registered as a nonprofit organization in the United States of America. SCARS Institute conducts its publishing and educational activities from the United States, and all SCARS Institute websites are published in and hosted within the United States of America. Its publication activities are principally governed by the Constitution and laws of the United States and applicable state law. The availability of SCARS Institute material through the global Internet is not intended, by itself, to constitute submission to the jurisdiction of every nation from which a website may be accessed. Where another jurisdiction’s law is legally applicable under recognized principles of jurisdiction or extraterritorial application, SCARS Institute respects applicable legal obligations, including legitimate protections for privacy, personal information, intellectual property, and freedom of expression. In the event that particular content published by SCARS Institute is alleged to violate, conflict with, or be prohibited by the laws of a specific country, and SCARS Institute receives valid notification from a competent lawful authority of that country identifying the content and applicable legal basis, SCARS Institute will review the matter and, where necessary, restrict access to the identified content within that country, including through geographic access controls or other technically appropriate means. Such a restriction is intended to address the laws of the affected jurisdiction without unnecessarily removing or restricting lawful content in the United States or in other jurisdictions where its publication remains lawful.
As part of its work in criminology, victimology, cybercrime education, scam research, victim advocacy, crime prevention, and public awareness, SCARS Institute displays certain photographs, screenshots, social-media content, messages, documents, advertisements, profiles, websites, graphics, recordings, and other materials as evidence or illustration of criminal activity, suspected criminal activity, fraud techniques, impersonation, identity misuse, offender behavior, manipulation, victimization, or related phenomena. This includes material associated with documented or reported crimes, material submitted by victims or witnesses, material contained in public sources, material that has been widely circulated or reproduced, and material examined as part of academic, educational, criminological, victimological, or fraud-prevention research.
Photographs and likenesses require particular consideration in relationship scams and other forms of impersonation crime. Criminals frequently appropriate photographs of innocent individuals and use those photographs as instruments of deception. When an image has been used in the commission, facilitation, documentation, investigation, or analysis of a crime, the criminal use of that image becomes a legitimate subject of criminological and victimological documentation and study. The image may constitute evidence of how an impersonation was carried out, how victims were deceived, how fraudulent identities were constructed, how the same identity was reused, or how a criminal pattern developed across multiple victims or platforms.
The fact that an innocent person’s photograph was misappropriated by a criminal does not imply that the person depicted participated in, approved of, benefited from, or had knowledge of the crime. SCARS Institute distinguishes between the individual depicted in an image and the criminal who misappropriated or used that image. Where appropriate, SCARS Institute identifies photographs as stolen, misappropriated, impersonated, or otherwise used without evidence that the depicted individual participated in the underlying criminal conduct.
At the same time, the use of a person’s photograph as evidence of fraud does not automatically extinguish every copyright, privacy, publicity, or personal-data right that might otherwise exist. SCARS Institute instead relies upon the legal protections, exceptions, limitations, and balancing principles applicable to truthful reporting, matters of legitimate public concern, academic and scientific research, criminology, victimology, fraud prevention, public education, documentary evidence, criticism, commentary, and freedom of expression. Privacy and personal-data laws are not properly interpreted as creating an absolute right to suppress truthful and lawfully obtained documentation of criminal conduct, particularly when publication serves a legitimate evidentiary, educational, research, crime-prevention, or public-interest purpose.
SCARS Institute therefore evaluates requests involving such material according to the nature and source of the material, its evidentiary value, whether it has already entered the public domain or widely distributed media, whether it appears in governmental or judicial records, the necessity of identification, the risk of incorrectly associating an innocent person with criminal conduct, the public interest served by continued publication, applicable privacy or publicity rights, and the requirements of applicable law. A request for removal does not automatically establish that continued publication is unlawful merely because a criminal previously used the requesting person’s photograph without permission. Likewise, the evidentiary character of an image does not automatically make every conceivable use of that image lawful.
These materials are presented for identification, analysis, criticism, commentary, documentation, education, scholarship, research, evidentiary context, crime prevention, victim protection, and public awareness. Their use is not intended to exploit the original work, compete with the copyright holder, create a substitute for the original work, interfere with its legitimate commercial market, or imply endorsement by the copyright owner or person depicted. SCARS Institute receives no direct financial benefit from the use of such third-party material.
Where a copyrighted photograph, screenshot, article, graphic, document, or other work forms part of a larger educational, research, investigative, or analytical publication, SCARS Institute seeks to use only the material reasonably necessary to demonstrate, document, identify, analyze, or explain the crime, conduct, victimization method, research subject, or public-interest issue under examination. In some circumstances, understanding the evidentiary significance of a photograph or other material requires displaying the entire item because the complete image, profile, message, advertisement, or document is itself the object being analyzed.
The fact that an image, photograph, screenshot, document, or other work has been widely circulated, publicly accessible, repeatedly reproduced, included in widely distributed media, or associated with criminal activity does not by itself eliminate copyright protection. SCARS Institute does not claim otherwise. Widespread circulation can, however, make particular material important to documenting criminal activity, identifying recurring impersonation identities, comparing fraudulent profiles, demonstrating how offenders represent themselves to victims, identifying patterns of organized fraud, warning potential victims, or preserving evidence relevant to legitimate criminological and victimological study.
Unless specifically identified as property of SCARS Institute, copyrights and other intellectual property rights in third-party material remain with their respective owners. The appearance of third-party material on a SCARS Institute website, publication, educational program, research resource, database, social-media account, or other platform does not imply sponsorship, endorsement, affiliation, authorization, or approval by the copyright holder or by any individual depicted in the material.
SCARS Institute also recognizes that United States law provides additional protections and limitations relevant to online publication. These include constitutional protections for truthful, lawfully obtained information concerning matters of legitimate public significance; statutory and common-law protections for bona fide reporting, commentary, scholarship, and matters of public interest; and, where legally applicable, statutory protections available to qualifying online service providers for material supplied by third parties. Such protections operate according to their individual statutory and constitutional requirements and are not asserted as blanket immunity from all legal obligations.
SCARS Institute seeks to act responsibly when documenting crimes and victimization. Where identifying an innocent person is unnecessary to the educational, evidentiary, research, or crime-prevention purpose, SCARS Institute may employ redaction, contextual labeling, anonymization, cropping, or other measures when appropriate. Where identification itself is materially relevant to demonstrating impersonation, repeated criminal use, fraud patterns, or other legitimate research or evidentiary purposes, preservation of the identifying material may be necessary to the integrity of the documentation.
Copyright owners who believe that copyrighted material has been used improperly by SCARS Institute are encouraged to provide sufficient information to identify the copyrighted work, establish their interest in the work, identify the material in question and its location, and explain the basis of their claim. Individuals whose names, photographs, likenesses, or other personal information appear in SCARS Institute materials may likewise contact SCARS Institute with specific concerns. Such requests will be reviewed in good faith according to applicable United States law, the source and nature of the material, its evidentiary and research significance, the legitimate public interest in documenting fraud and criminal behavior, and any applicable legal rights or obligations.
The SCARS Institute also relies, where applicable, upon the protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230. Section 230 generally provides that a provider or user of an interactive computer service shall not be treated as the publisher or speaker of information provided by another information content provider. Accordingly, where articles, comments, reports, personal accounts, educational materials, research contributions, photographs, observations, or other content are independently created and submitted or published by SCARS Institute volunteers, community participants, contributors, or other third parties, SCARS Institute may be protected from civil liability that seeks to treat it as the publisher or speaker of that third-party content. The protection also generally preserves traditional editorial functions such as deciding whether to publish, retain, remove, organize, or moderate third-party material. Section 230 protection is determined by the circumstances of the particular content and claim, however, and does not apply merely because an author serves without compensation. Where SCARS Institute itself is responsible, in whole or in material part, for creating or developing the allegedly unlawful aspect of particular content, it may be considered an information content provider with respect to that material and Section 230 protection may not apply. Section 230 also contains statutory exceptions and does not provide immunity from intellectual-property law, federal criminal law, or other categories expressly excluded by the statute. SCARS Institute therefore treats Section 230 as an important protection for qualifying third-party and independently contributed content, not as a blanket exemption from responsibility for all material appearing on its websites.
SCARS Institute remains committed both to respecting legitimate intellectual-property and privacy interests and to preserving the ability of researchers, educators, advocates, victims, and the public to document, understand, expose, and prevent relationship scams and related crimes.
For all questions about the above, please contact us by writing an email sent to: legal@AgainstScams.org
LEGAL STATEMENT
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. Website and All Original Content, Concepts, and Intellectual Property Copyright © 1995 – 2026 | All Rights Reserved | Third-party Copyrights Acknowledged | Some Images Reproduced As Legal Record Of Criminal Use By Third-parties | Evidence Photos Used To Report Their Use In Criminal Fraud
