How to report a scammer on Fiverr, and how to report a scammer on Grindr: the account desk, the money desk and the record

By Devin Marsh Published 14 October 2026 23 min read

Most people file one report and stop. They flag the profile, the profile disappears a few days later, and the money is still gone. The platform did what a platform report can do: remove an account. Getting a payment back was never something that report could do. A scam leaves three separate jobs behind it, and each one belongs to a different desk. That holds for how to report a scammer on Fiverr, for how to report a scammer on Grindr, and for every other service below.

This guide sets out those three desks, then walks through 18 services where scam and impersonation reports are filed: Fiverr, Grindr, five marketplaces, three payment apps, Binance, Roblox, Steam, Signal, X, YouTube, LinkedIn and scam websites. Each entry gives the report path from the service's own help pages where those pages could be read on 14 October 2026, and says so where they could not. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.

How to report impersonation or a scam: which desk does what?

How to report impersonation or a scam depends on what you want back. The platform where the scammer has an account can remove that account. The bank, card issuer or payment app that moved the money is the only desk that can reverse a payment. A government record, filed with the FTC, the FBI's IC3 or local police, does neither, but banks and exchanges often ask for it.

Impersonation is a scam's most common costume. The scammer copies a real person, a brand or a support team, and the copy does the persuading. That is why an impersonation report and a scam report often concern the same account, and why platforms route them differently: impersonation reporting usually asks who is being copied, while a scam report asks what was promised and paid.

Consumers filed 3 million fraud reports with the FTC in 2025 and reported losing $15.9 billion. Imposter scams were the largest category by count, with more than 1 million reports and more than $3.5 billion lost.Federal Trade Commission, testimony to the Joint Economic Committee, 25 March 2026

The three desks work on different evidence and different clocks:

1. The account desk

   The platform's trust and safety team reviews the profile, listing or message against its own rules. The outcome is a removal, a restriction or nothing. Most platforms do not tell the reporter which. Evidence that helps: the profile URL or username, screenshots of the messages, and the listing as it appeared.

2. The money desk

   The payment provider decides whether a transfer can be cancelled, disputed or reimbursed. Card payments carry chargeback rights. Instant transfers between people mostly do not. The clock here is the shortest of the three, and the evidence is the transaction record, not the profile.

3. The record

   A report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, a complaint at the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, or a local police report creates a reference number. That number is what a bank's fraud team or a crypto exchange asks for before acting. The agencies themselves rarely resolve an individual case.

The order matters. File with the money desk first, because payment windows close in days. Save evidence second, before the platform removes the account and the messages with it. Report the account third. The sections below follow the account desk service by service and name the money desk for each.

How to report a scammer on Fiverr: what can you actually flag?

To report a scammer on Fiverr, report the thing the scammer sent or published. On a Gig page, click the ellipsis, select Report an issue, choose a reason and submit. In the Inbox, open the message, click the ellipsis, select Report and choose a reason. Fiverr's Trust & Safety team reviews each report manually. A profile cannot be reported as a whole.

That last rule is the one most guides get wrong. Fiverr's help article on reporting content states: "You can report Gigs, messages, Zoom calls and briefs, but you cannot report a user's entire profile at once." Guides that describe a three-dot menu on the profile with a "Report" option are describing something Fiverr's own page says does not exist. The report attaches to a Gig, a message, a video call, a brief or a portfolio item.

Four more conditions from the same help page shape how to report a scammer on Fiverr in practice:

• The reporter must be a registered, email-verified Fiverr user. EU residents may report certain serious violations without logging in.
• A message can be reported from the Inbox only. Fiverr notes that messages "cannot be reported through the inbox drawer within the order page".
• The message report has an optional box to block the user. A red flag then marks the reported message.
• False reports "can lead to account sanctions" for the person who filed them.

Sellers receive a different scam from buyers. Fiverr's safety article quotes a typical one: a "recruiter" who praises the freelancer's profile, offers $25 per page and asks the freelancer to contact a manager on Telegram. Fiverr tells freelancers to mark such messages as spam, and adds that spam marked within 24 hours of being sent does not count against the seller's response rate. Once the conversation has moved to Telegram, the Fiverr report still matters, and the second report belongs with reporting the Telegram account that took over the conversation.

Anyone searching how to report a scammer on Fiverr after paying off-platform is in the weakest position. Fiverr has no record of the payment, the scammer's Gig may be genuine-looking and unrelated, and the only evidence is the Inbox thread where the move off-platform was proposed. Report that message, since asking a buyer to pay outside Fiverr is itself a violation, and then treat the loss as a payment dispute.

How to report a scammer on Grindr, and how to report impersonation on Grindr

To report a scammer on Grindr, open the profile, tap the block icon in the top-left corner and choose Report. Pick a category, describe what happened, mark where it happened and submit. How to report impersonation on Grindr uses the same menu: the category list includes Impersonation, defined by Grindr as "if anyone is pretending to be you or someone you know".

Grindr's help page on blocking and reporting lists seven categories: Illegal Activity, Spam, Harassment or Bullying, Hate Speech/Discrimination, Nudity or Pornography, Underage, and Impersonation. None of the seven is called "scam". Our reading is that a money scam fits Spam or Illegal Activity, and a profile built on someone else's photos fits Impersonation. The free-text step, "Tell Us What Happened", is where the scam itself should be described: what was asked for, through which payment method, and when.

Three details on that page change how a Grindr report should be filed:

• The form asks where the offence occurred: Profile Photo, Profile Information, Chat Message or Album content. Depending on the choice, it offers to include the last 30 chats with the reported person. Accept that offer. The chat is the evidence.
• "Reporting a profile does not block it." Blocking is a separate tap, and it should come after the report and after screenshots, because a blocked conversation is harder to document.
• The help page has its own section on reporting users who have blocked you, and an email route for people who are no longer using the app.

Grindr's scam awareness guide explains why speed matters: "Scammers know they will be banned on Grindr quickly, so they often try to move to email, text, etc. right away." The same guide says Grindr runs "a dedicated moderation team, working 24/7", and warns that any request for a verification code should be treated as a scam. A person working out how to report a scammer on Grindr after the chat has moved to another app should still file the Grindr report, then report the second account where it lives.

Sextortion is the Grindr scam with the highest stakes. The scammer collects intimate images, then threatens to send them to family or an employer. Paying does not end the demands. The steps that help are a Grindr report, a report to the FBI's IC3 or local police, and the separate process for removal of leaked intimate images if anything is published. Grindr publishes no figures on how many reported profiles it removes, so no success rate can be quoted. In practice, how to report a scammer on Grindr comes down to handing the moderators good evidence. Profiles built on stolen photos are covered separately in the guide to reporting a Grindr catfish.

How do you report a scammer on Poshmark, Vinted, eBay, OfferUp or Temu?

Every marketplace has a report link on the profile, the listing or the chat, and every marketplace limits its refund guarantee to payments made through its own checkout. A report removes a seller. A claim under the buyer guarantee returns money, and the claim window is short: 2 days on Vinted, 3 days on Poshmark, 30 days on eBay.

How to report a scammer on Poshmark: Poshmark's support article gives four steps, which are to go to the user's closet, select the Action Menu, select Report User and choose the reason. Poshmark also asks anyone approached to take a sale offline to email support straight away with usernames, listing titles and screenshots. Its guidelines say directing transactions off Poshmark is not allowed, and Posh Protect "does not cover offline transactions".

How to report a scammer on Vinted: open the chat with the member, select the ⓘ symbol, select Report, choose the reason and press Submit. Vinted's help page lists scamming and phishing among the reportable message types. Vinted's wording on off-platform payment is blunt: a buyer who pays without the "Buy now" button is not covered, "and unfortunately, we'll be unable to offer you our support".

How to report a seller on eBay for scamming is two actions that people often merge. Reporting the listing tells eBay the seller broke a rule. Opening a request under the Money Back Guarantee is what returns the money. The guarantee gives the seller 3 business days to respond before the buyer can ask eBay to step in, and it excludes any payment made outside eBay.

How to report OfferUp scammer accounts is the least documented of the five. No OfferUp help page surfaced in our research, so the path given here comes from security firm ESET's guide: open the conversation, tap the three dots and choose Report. OfferUp deals are often local and paid in cash or by a payment app, which puts the money outside any marketplace guarantee. For a theft at a meet-up, the report that counts is the police report.

How to report Temu scam activity depends on whether Temu was involved at all. Many "Temu scams" are look-alike websites and delivery-fee texts that only borrow the name. In a November 2023 statement Temu asked consumers to send those to its suspicious-report form at temu.com/bgch_report_suspicious.html. A charge taken by a fake site is a card dispute, and the site itself can be reported through the phishing takedown process that goes to its host and registrar.

How do you report a scammer on Venmo, Cash App or Zelle?

All three payment apps accept a report against the recipient's account, and all three treat a payment the sender approved differently from one the sender never authorised. An unauthorised payment is usually reimbursed. A payment sent willingly to a scammer usually is not, with one stated exception on Zelle for qualifying imposter scams.

People phrase the same question several ways, and each phrasing lands on the same two screens:

Venmo

Venmo's help centre warns: "Do not use Venmo to pay or receive payments from people you don't know, especially if the payment involves the purchase or sale of a good or service." Purchase Protection applies to payments sent to a business profile, or to a personal profile when the sender tagged the payment as a purchase. Venmo says the tag cannot be added afterwards. For an untagged payment to a stranger, Venmo's advice is to contact Support as soon as possible and consider local law enforcement.

Cash App

Cash App's help page on scams says: "Cash App to Cash App payments are instant and usually can't be canceled." The same page lists what Cash App Support will never ask for: a sign-in code, a PIN, a payment to any account, or a "test" transaction. Someone asking for any of those while claiming to be Cash App is the scammer. Report the payment first and the account second, because the payment report is the one tied to the money.

Zelle

Zelle is run by Early Warning Services, which is owned by banks, and the report goes to the sender's own bank. Early Warning Services told Reuters in November 2023: "As of June 30, 2023, our bank and credit union participants must reimburse consumers for qualifying imposter scams." That covers scammers posing as a bank, a government agency or a service provider. By that description, the policy does not extend to a fake seller or a romance scam.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleged that customers of three large banks lost more than $870 million to fraud on Zelle over seven years. The Bureau filed suit in December 2024 and dismissed the case on 4 March 2025.CFPB complaint, as reported by NPR, 4 March 2025

The dismissal left the rules where they were. US law requires banks to reimburse unauthorised electronic transfers, and a transfer the customer approved under false pretences is, in most banks' reading, authorised. When a bank refuses, ask for the refusal in writing, then file a complaint with the CFPB and keep the FTC or police reference number in the same file.

How do you report a Binance scammer, and how do you report a crypto scam to police?

How to report Binance scammer accounts: file a request with Binance Support that describes what happened and links every blockchain transaction involved. Binance says it will temporarily freeze assets where there is substantial evidence of theft, and that it needs a police report within 24 hours of the request. A crypto transfer cannot be reversed by the sender or by Binance.

Binance's support article on stolen funds is specific about who does what after the freeze. Binance works "directly with law enforcement officials", and its security blog states that tracing and recovering funds is primarily the responsibility of law enforcement. Binance also says it does not process requests from private investigators without law enforcement involvement. That last point matters because recovery agents are the second scam aimed at crypto victims: they charge an upfront fee to "trace" funds they have no power to retrieve.

How to report crypto scam to police, in the United States, means two filings. The first is a complaint at ic3.gov, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. The second is a report to local police on the non-emergency line, which produces the report number Binance or a bank will ask for. Both filings need the same list: wallet addresses, transaction hashes, dates, amounts, the exchange used, and every username, phone number and website the scammer used.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 cryptocurrency-related complaints in 2025, with reported losses of about $11.4 billion, a record. The IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints of all kinds, the first year above one million.FBI IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report, as reported by The Block and HSToday, April 2026

Those figures explain the response a victim usually gets. A police report on a crypto scam is rarely investigated as a single case. Its value is as a record: it starts the exchange's process, supports a tax-loss or insurance position where one exists, and adds the scammer's wallet to the data investigators use when they do build a case against a network.

How do you report someone on Roblox or Steam for scamming, and how do you report a Signal scammer?

Roblox and Steam both accept scam reports from the scammer's profile and both act on the account, but neither returns what was traded away. Signal accepts a report from inside the chat and can act only on the sender's number, because Signal cannot read message content. On all three, the report is an account-desk report with no money desk behind it.

Roblox

How to report someone on Roblox for scamming: use the Report Abuse option on the player's profile or inside the experience and pick the category that describes the scam. Roblox's help article on trading scams says the Report Abuse buttons are the way to report anyone scamming. The same article says that when a deal is made outside Roblox's official Trade and Sell features, Roblox cannot return the items or Robux. The guide to what gets a Roblox account banned covers how those reports are weighed.

Steam

How to report Steam account for scamming is set out in Steam Support's Scam FAQ: go to the profile, click the "..." drop-down at the top right, choose Report Player, select the violation and submit. Steam is one of the few services that closes the loop. Its FAQ says: "If a user you've reported for scamming has had action taken on their account, you'll be notified with a message in Steam."

The same FAQ is plain about the limit. Steam bans scammers from the Steam Community, including trading and the Market, and may ban every account the scammer holds. It does not restore the items. Steam's stated reason is economic: an item's value depends on scarcity, and "if more copies of the item are added to the economy through inventory rollbacks, the value of every other instance of that item would be reduced".

Signal

How to report Signal scammer accounts: on the message request, or from the chat settings, choose Report and then Report and Block. Signal's support pages say that anyone claiming to be Signal support or security inside a chat "is a SCAM and phishing attempt", and that Signal staff never start a conversation where messages can be exchanged. Signal never asks for a verification code, a PIN or a recovery key.

A Signal report carries very little. When Signal introduced the feature in 2021 it said the device sends only the phone number that started the conversation and a one-time message ID, as BleepingComputer and SecurityWeek reported. No message text reaches Signal. A Signal report can therefore slow a spammer down. It cannot document a fraud, so screenshots taken before blocking are the only record a bank or the police will ever see.

Where is the impersonation report form on X, YouTube and LinkedIn?

An impersonation report form is a dedicated form that asks who is being copied, separate from the general report menu. X has one at help.x.com/en/forms/authenticity/impersonation. YouTube links one from its impersonation policy. LinkedIn handles impersonation inside the profile's Report / Block menu. The person being copied, or an authorised representative, gets the strongest result from all three.

Impersonation report on X

An impersonation report X accepts starts with one question: "Who is being impersonated?" The three answers are me or someone I am authorised to represent, my company, brand or organisation, and someone else on X. No X account is needed to file. X's Authenticity policy lets parody, commentary and fan accounts stay if they meet four labelling conditions, so impersonation removal X carries out is either a suspension or a demand that the account change its name, avatar and bio.

The full walk-through is in the guide to filing an X impersonation report. Where the account is abusive without copying anyone, reporting the whole X account is the right menu, and one harmful post is handled by reporting a single post. A clone that reposts your photos or artwork can also be reached with an X copyright notice, which runs on a legal clock the impersonation queue does not have. X's policy also states that it "does not intervene in financial disputes", so a report about a seller who took payment on X will not produce a refund.

YouTube channels and ads

How to report a YouTube channel for impersonation: use the impersonation form linked from YouTube's impersonation policy if your own channel is the one being copied, or the report option on the channel's page as a viewer. The policy says YouTube "does not allow unauthorized impersonation of a person, entity, or channel", and that a channel set up to impersonate another "may be removed". The policy also covers channels that use AI to copy a person's voice or likeness.

Ads follow a different route from channels. How to report scam YouTube ads: use the information or three-dot control on the ad itself and choose the report option, which opens Google's ad report form. How to report YouTube ads impersonation uses the same form, with the category for misleading content or scams and a note naming the person or brand being copied. Anyone asking how to report YouTube ads scams should copy the ad's URL and take a screenshot first, because scam ads rotate quickly.

Google blocked or removed more than 8.3 billion ads and suspended 24.9 million advertiser accounts in 2025. Of those, 602 million ads and 4 million accounts were tied to scams.Google 2025 Ads Safety Report, as reported by Search Engine Land and PPC Land, April 2026

A scam channel and a scam video have their own guides: what ends a YouTube channel, and getting a single YouTube video removed when the channel itself is not the problem.

LinkedIn

How to report fake profiles on LinkedIn: click More on the profile, choose Report / Block, select the option to report the member or entire account, then pick "This person is impersonating someone" or "This account is not a real person" and submit. Those steps are from LinkedIn's help centre. Fake recruiter profiles are the usual LinkedIn scam, and the guide to the five LinkedIn takedown routes covers what to file when the in-profile report is not enough.

Meta, TikTok and the rest

Facebook, Instagram and TikTok each split impersonation from scams in their own way. Facebook has a form that works without an account, described in the guide to Facebook's impersonation report, and a separate process for reporting a fake Facebook account that copies nobody in particular. An impersonator who also sends threats belongs in a Facebook harassment report as well. For the other two, see reporting an Instagram account and reporting a TikTok scammer.

How do you report scam websites?

How to report scam websites: send the exact URL to Google Safe Browsing so browsers warn visitors, send an abuse report to the site's hosting company and domain registrar so the site can be switched off, and file with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov for the record. If the site copies a real brand, tell the brand. The browser warning arrives first. Removal takes longer.

The four reports do different things. A Safe Browsing listing puts a red warning in front of the page but leaves the page online. A host can delete the content. A registrar can suspend the whole domain. The FTC report helps no single victim directly and feeds the database investigators search.

Registrars are bound by contract for some scam sites and not others. Under section 3.18.2 of ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement, in force since 5 April 2024, a registrar with actionable evidence of DNS abuse "must promptly take the appropriate mitigation action(s)". ICANN defines DNS abuse as malware, botnets, phishing, pharming and spam used to deliver them. A fake shop that takes payment and ships nothing is fraud, but it is not phishing under that definition, and a registrar may answer that the complaint belongs with the host or the police.

A report to a registrar or host works when it can be checked in a minute. Give the full URL of the page that collects logins or payments, a screenshot with the address bar visible, the date and time, and the brand or person being copied. Reports that say only "this site is a scam" tend to be closed without action.

What can each scam report do, and what can it not do?

Across the 18 services in this guide, the account report removes or restricts an account and nothing more. Money comes back only through a marketplace guarantee, a card dispute, a bank's reimbursement policy or, rarely, an exchange freeze. The table compiles each service's own published position as read on 14 October 2026, with third-party sourcing marked.

A reader who arrived asking how to report a scammer on Fiverr or how to report a scammer on Grindr will find both in the first two rows, with different answers in every column. Read down the third column. On 7 of the 18 rows, no desk at the service can return money at all. That is our count from the table above, and it is the reason the payment report has to be filed before the account report on almost every service listed.

When will a scam or impersonation report not work?

A scam report fails in four predictable cases: the payment was authorised and sent by an instant method, the evidence was deleted with the account, the report went to the wrong desk, or the "scam" is a dispute about quality. An impersonation report fails when the filer is not the person copied and the platform accepts first-person reports only, or when the account is labelled parody.

Three further limits apply to every service above. No platform promises to tell the reporter what happened, and Steam's in-app notice is the exception. A removed account can be recreated in minutes under a new name. And repeat reports from friends do not add weight: X's Authenticity policy bans duplicate and false mass reports while allowing manual good-faith ones, and Fiverr warns that misuse of reporting can bring sanctions on the reporter.

A paid service adds something in a narrower set of cases than its marketing suggests. It can file as an authorised representative where a platform accepts one, keep track of a clone that reappears across several platforms, and prepare host and registrar reports for a scam site. It cannot recover a payment, speed up a platform's review or guarantee a removal. The guide to what a content removal service can do sets out those limits in full.

Clearline handles impersonation and brand-abuse cases as part of its content removal casework, and locked or hijacked accounts through account recovery. We do not take fees to recover scammed money, and anyone who offers to do that for an upfront payment should be treated as the next scam.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Reporting a scam on Telegram
• Which Instagram impersonation form fits
• Abuse reporting routes by platform