What this is
Just Checking, Mate is a free scam checker built for Australians, with local coverage for the UK, US, New Zealand and Ireland as well. Paste a suspicious link, text, email or phone number and get an instant best-effort verdict — no account, no tracking, no data sold. It's an independent project by Aleks Linde (opens in a new tab), not a government service.
It gives a best-effort check only — it can't guarantee it catches every scam. For official reporting, use Scamwatch (scamwatch.gov.au) and ReportCyber (cyber.gov.au/report).
When you check something
Nothing you paste is stored. The content is analysed in memory and discarded; we only count that a check happened. Screenshots and .eml files are processed in memory (QR decoding happens entirely on your device) and never written to disk.
We never open the links you check. The analysis is pure pattern-matching — no request is ever made to a scammer's site, so they can't tell their link is being investigated. Our security policy blocks the browser from contacting any outside server.
Where we think you are
Scams are local, so the checks are too — the agencies, banks, brands and phone-number rules we match against are the ones for your country. We cover Australia, the UK, the US, New Zealand and Ireland in full, Canada in part, and fall back to country-neutral checks everywhere else.
To pick the right set we use a two-letter country code, and nothing finer — derived from your connection by the network, never read from your IP address by us, and not stored when you run a check. If it guesses wrong, because you're travelling or on a VPN, you can change the region yourself and check again.
We tell you when we haven't checked much. Outside the countries we cover properly, “nothing found” can just mean “we have no local rules to find it with” — so instead of showing a confident all-clear, we say the coverage is limited and show you what to look for yourself.
Threat radar & scam calendar
The threat radar lists campaigns doing the rounds in the last few weeks, and the scam calendar shows when scams spike through the year — tax time, Black Friday, the Christmas parcel rush. Both are hand-written from published threat intelligence and read nothing about you; they're the same pages for everyone in your country.
Both are there to teach, and neither changes a verdict. The date is never part of the score: a tax scam in March is still a scam, and a genuine ATO email in July is still genuine. The radar also says plainly which campaigns we catch and which we don't yet.
When you report a scam
A report stores exactly these things, and nothing else:
- The scam content and identifiers you submit — with tracking parameters stripped, your own email headers removed, and personal details (emails, phone numbers, tax file numbers and the like) automatically scrubbed before storage. Everything shown publicly is also “defanged” so it can't be clicked or dialled by accident.
- A coarse location, never your IP address. At submission time we derive a region from the connection — state level for Australia (e.g. “NSW, Australia”), country level elsewhere — and store only that string. It's shown on the public report so people can see where a scam is circulating. Your IP is used in memory for rate limiting while the request is processed and is never stored by the application; city-level detail is deliberately not used.
- Your email, only if you choose to give it. It's used solely to follow up on your report. It is never published, never shared with anyone, and never used for anything else.
Public reports are community-submitted and unverified. Want one removed or have a question about your data? Use the “Report a bug” button (bottom-right) with your report reference and your email — we'll sort it out.
Bug reports & tracking
If something breaks we may offer to send diagnostics, but nothing is ever sent without your explicit consent — you see the exact details (page, browser, error message) before deciding. The scam content you pasted and any files you uploaded are never included.
No analytics scripts, no advertising pixels, no cookies for tracking. Your language preference and view settings live in your own browser's storage and never leave it. The site's security policy prevents pages from talking to any third-party server at all.
Blocking & reporting spam
Step-by-step guides for blocking and reporting spam — in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and Yahoo, and on iPhone, Android and messaging apps — now live on the Learn page.