Am I Being Scammed? 15-Question Quiz for Sexting & Crypto Scams

The guide

What your score actually means

Every line you ticked is a pattern scammers run thousands of times. Below, each signal broken down. What it really tells you, and what to do next.

15 signs of a scammer online

One flag on its own means almost nothing. Three or four together, in the same conversation, almost always means something. Here is what each line above actually signals and why scammers keep running the same plays.

They pushed to move the chat off this app to
WhatsApp,
Telegram, or
Signal.

Moving between messengers is normal on sextext. That is literally the product. The red flag is the second switch. They advertised Snap or Kik, you connected there, and within a few days they wanted you on WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal instead. Scammers do this because they need to walk you away from the app where they can be reported and into one where bans and takedowns are slower or impossible.

They sent a link, QR code, or asked you to install an app (trading platform, wallet, or verification tool).

Pig butchering in 2026 often starts the moment they can walk you onto their app. A custom-looking trading dashboard where your “balance” climbs while you watch. A cloned wallet that looks like MetaMask but was compiled yesterday. A “verification portal” that is a phishing page for your Snapchat, Instagram, or OnlyFans password. The US Secret Service publicly warned about pig butchering crypto scams in April 2026, calling them “the modern-day Ponzi scheme” and flagging suspicious links in investment offers. Rule: if you met someone on one app and they want you to install or open a different one for anything involving money or account credentials, treat the install request itself as the red flag.

They brought up crypto, Bitcoin, Tether, or an investment platform you hadn't heard of.

Most of these scams end the same way. You buy crypto on a real exchange like Coinbase. Then you send it to an “investment site” they recommend. That site is fake. The money is gone. If they brought up crypto on a sexting or dating app, they didn't pick you for your trading instincts.

They added you to a group chat where people share their investment wins.

Every one of these groups runs the same script. Names like VIP Wealth Elite Forum or Fortune Pioneer Club. A “professor” drops trading calls each morning. Members post profit screenshots. Reverse image search any photo and you will find the real owner, usually on Instagram or LinkedIn under a totally different name.

They asked you to pay a fee to unlock, verify, or withdraw your own money.

Paying for content on sextext is normal. Creators sell photos, and that is a fair exchange. The red flag is a fee on your own money. A “verification” payment. A “20% tax” to release earnings. A “compliance fee” to unlock a wallet. No real exchange charges this. Fees always come out of the transaction itself, never out of your pocket upfront.

They asked you to send money via gift cards, Zelle, Venmo, CashApp, or crypto (outside of paid content).

Real creators on sextext sell content directly and the payment goes to them. The red flag is a request that routes through untraceable rails: Amazon or Apple gift cards, Zelle, Venmo, CashApp, or a crypto wallet address. The FBI and FTC consistently report that these rails dominate scam payout methods precisely because they are hard or impossible to reverse once the money leaves your account. Card networks can claw back fraud. Gift card balances and crypto transfers cannot. That is why scammers insist on them. The moment the conversation pivots from chat to “send me $50 in Apple gift cards” or “send this USDT to this address,” the payment method itself is telling you what is about to happen.

They promised fast profit, insider tips, or guaranteed returns.

No real investment guarantees returns. It is illegal for a reason. Scammers promise them anyway because it shuts down the part of your brain that checks for risk. If the win is guaranteed, where is the harm in trying?

They refused a simple verification photo. No selfie with three fingers up, no photo with today's date on paper.

Most sextext users skip video calls, and that is fine. Anonymity is part of why people come here. The specific red flag is refusing a low-stakes verification. Ask for a selfie with a custom pose (three fingers up, thumbs-up, holding a slip of paper with your nickname or the date). Real people do this in 30 seconds. A scammer using someone else's photos cannot. They do not have the real person on hand to ask.

On a video call something felt off. Lag, weird eye movement, blur around the face, or they refused to turn their head or wave a hand across it.

Real-time deepfake filters are now in the hands of low-budget scam compounds. A scammer can sit on a video call using a stolen or AI-generated face overlaid on their own in real time. The filters work best on a still face looking forward. They glitch under fast motion. Ask the person on the other end to rotate their head 90 degrees, tuck their chin down, or wave a hand in front of their face. Most current filters lag, blur, or warp under these tests. If they refuse (“my connection is bad,” “my camera is weird today”), that refusal IS the signal. A real person has nothing to hide from a five-second head turn. Per the ABA Foundation and FBI 2026 joint deepfake infographic, video or voice alone is no longer reliable identity verification. Pair any video call with a live selfie challenge.

Their photos look AI-generated or match a different real person when you reverse image search them.

Polished photos are normal on sextext. A lot of creators have professional sets. The flag is not polish, it is provenance. Two scenarios: (1) reverse image search returns the same face on a real person's Instagram or OnlyFans under a totally different name. That is identity theft. (2) reverse search returns zero matches, and the photos have small AI tells: asymmetric earrings, weird fingers, backgrounds that do not quite connect, skin with no pores. AI portrait generators are good enough in 2026 to fool most people on a phone screen. Both scenarios mean the person in the chat is not the person in the photos.

They said “I feel like I have known you forever” or “you are different from everyone else” within the first day or two.

Pet names on a sexting app are not a red flag. That is the register of the conversation. The specific pattern is scripted emotional escalation. Declarations of connection that arrive on a schedule. Scripts hand these out to scammers to hit 24-hour, 48-hour, and week-one emotional beats. Real people say “I feel like I have known you forever” to someone they actually have known for a while. Scammers say it on day two because the script says day two.

They told a story built for sympathy. A dead parent, a sick child, a soldier posted abroad, an oil-rig shift, a doctor mid-deployment.

The same five or six stories show up in every scam script. They do two jobs at once. First, they explain why you can never actually meet. Second, they build emotional debt. By the time money comes up, you already feel like you owe them something.

They asked about your job, savings, retirement, or investments.

This is research, not curiosity. It tells them how much to ask for, whether you have liquid cash, and which script to run. A real partner asks what you do for a living. They don't ask about your 401(k) balance on a third chat.

Their messages read scripted or translated. “Kindly advise,” “I will proceed,” “making money is happiness.” Canned phrases, not conversation.

Non-native English on its own is not a red flag. Our user base is global. The specific pattern is script language. UN OHCHR and investigative journalists (including ProPublica) have documented that scam compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar operate from standardized chat scripts. Phrases like “kindly advise,” “I will revert shortly,” and “making money is happiness” recur across victim screenshots. Scammers paste them, sometimes through an AI auto-reply layer before a human takes over. The English is not bad; it is corporate and unnatural for intimate chat.

They threatened to send your photos or messages to people you know.

This is sextortion. It is a crime in every country we write for. Don't pay. Paying tells them the threat works, so they will escalate. Screenshot everything first. Then block them. Then use the reporting links at the bottom of this page. You are the victim of a crime, not the cause of one.

What is pig butchering? A sexting scam that ends in crypto.

What is a pig butchering scam? Pig butchering is what the scammers call it themselves. They fatten up a victim with weeks of emotional intimacy, then they slaughter. It is the modern shape of the classic romance scam: instead of asking you for money to fly home from a fake oil rig, they steer you into a fake crypto investment that empties your savings. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report logged $20.88 billion in total cybercrime losses that year alone, with $8.6 billion in investment fraud, most of it crypto investment scams ($7.2 billion) driven by pig butchering and fake trading platforms. Additional reporting by Chainalysis, the US Secret Service, and the Wikipedia overview tracks it as the fastest-growing financial crime on the planet.

It starts quiet. A wrong-number text. A dating-app match. A DM on a sexting platform like sextext. A LinkedIn connect from someone who claims you met at a conference. The chat is warm. They seem interested. Within a few days or weeks, they suggest moving the chat to WhatsApp or Telegram “because it is more private.”

From there, the script runs for weeks or months. Good morning every morning. Good night every night. It feels like a real relationship. A lot of these conversations now start with an AI chatbot handling the first wave of replies: canned good-mornings, canned compliments, canned emoji. Once you respond back more than once or twice, a human from the compound takes over and the script picks up where the bot left off. That is why the tone sometimes shifts overnight. Then one day they mention the investment that changed their life. A private crypto platform. A family friend at a hedge fund who shares insider tips. A “professor” in a group chat who drops trading calls every morning. The site they send you to looks legitimate. Your account shows your deposit. The numbers climb every day.

None of it is real. The dashboard is designed to show whatever number makes you deposit more. The second you try to withdraw, a “tax” comes up. Twenty percent. You pay. Then a “compliance fee.” You pay that too. When you run out of money, or start asking the wrong questions, the account, the site, and the scammer all vanish at once. The money is cashed out through an exchange in Southeast Asia. There is no support desk to call. There is no phone number on the website. There is no one.

Most of these operations are Chinese organized crime, based in compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar. A lot of the workers are trafficking victims themselves. They answered a job ad, flew to Thailand, and had their passports taken on arrival. Now they run scam scripts under threat of violence. The Global Anti-Scam Organization tracks rescues and works with law enforcement on both sides of the crime. That context does not make the crime smaller. It does mean the “person” in your chat is probably not the villain. The operation they are trapped inside is. If you have lost money, file with the FTC and IC3. They feed data to the task forces that target these compounds.

The scam works because intimacy and greed almost never run into each other. When they do, judgment gets thin. Knowing that will not protect you. Recognizing the pattern might. If you want to see the playbook unpacked end-to-end by an investigative journalist who joined one of these WhatsApp group chats and tracked the scammers down, the 20-minute video below is the most thorough walkthrough we have found.

Tunnel Vision investigates a pig butchering WhatsApp group, reverse-image-searches the fake profiles, and traces the operation back to compounds in Southeast Asia.

Sextortion and sexting scams: what to do if they threaten you

What is sextortion? Sextortion is when someone threatens to send your intimate photos, texts, or video calls to your family, friends, or employer if you don't pay. It is a crime in every country we write for. US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Whatever they tell you about your responsibility, whatever embarrassment you feel, you are the victim of a crime. That is the frame to start from.

How to get rid of blackmailers without paying. The one thing to take from this page: don't pay. Paying does not stop the threat. It confirms the threat works. Scammers come back for more, or sell your contact to another group that will. We know this advice is easier to read than to follow at 2am with your phone full of screenshots. It is still the only advice that actually ends the blackmail loop.

Second thing: don't delete the conversation. The instinct makes sense. You want it gone. But those messages are evidence. Screenshot everything first. Back up the screenshots to cloud storage. Then block the account. Keep the screenshots even if you think nothing will ever come of them. Sextortion cases often take a year or more to resolve.

If you are under 18, or the photos involve anyone under 18, use the NCMEC CyberTipline. For stopping already-leaked nudes from spreading further, NCMEC also runs Take It Down, a free tool that hashes your photos and blocks matching copies across Facebook, Instagram, OnlyFans, and TikTok. They can get content pulled from major platforms faster than any other route. If you are an adult in the US, file a report with IC3 (the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center). Outside the US, see the country list on the result panel above.

On sextext specifically: if the contact started on our platform, report them. We ban these accounts within hours and keep the evidence on file. If a scammer already sent screenshots to your contacts or your content landed somewhere it should not have, file a content removal request and we respond within 48 hours. Even if the threat only landed after they moved you to WhatsApp, Snapchat, or Telegram, report them here too. We share patterns with other platforms and with law enforcement contacts.

A warning about profiles that look too young. Generative AI has turned the teen-sextortion problem into a crisis. NCMEC logged 4,700 reports of generative-AI-related CSAM in 2023, 67,000 in 2024, and roughly 1.5 million in 2025. About 1.1 million of those were non-actionable submissions from Amazon AI Services, leaving around 400,000 actionable reports. Some of that volume is scammers operating fake teen profiles as bait: the profile you are chatting with may look underage in the photos but is actually an adult running a script, or the photos themselves are AI-generated. If anything on the profile reads as under-18, stop the conversation, do not send anything explicit, and report the account to the platform. Sextext is strictly 18-plus; report these profiles via our content removal form. The opposite trap is just as common, and we cover it below.

A flipped variant: the "I was 16" threat after the chat. Since late April 2026 we have been seeing a different version of this on sextext. The profile reads as a woman in her early twenties, with a Telegram or Snapchat handle in the post. You message her, you exchange photos, maybe a video. Then she flips. Now she tells you she was sixteen the whole time. The screenshots are about to go to the police. She wants a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin or gift cards before she "has to" file a report. One handle we have seen on multiple posts is Sweetscarlett2 on Telegram. The names rotate, the script does not.

This is a script. The people running it are adults with bank accounts and a backlog of victims. The "I am reporting you to the police" line exists for one reason: to scare you into paying within the next 24 hours. Police do not prosecute adults for sexting another adult who, in a panic message demanding Bitcoin, suddenly claims to have been underage. Stop replying. Do not argue, do not explain. Screenshot the chat, block the account, and report the original sextext profile via content removal. The pressure peaks for about a day, then drops, because you stopped feeding it.

One last thing: tell someone you trust. Shame is the second weapon here. The scammer relies on you being too embarrassed to loop anyone in. A single friend, sibling, or family member you can say this out loud to breaks that weapon completely. You do not have to show them the messages. You just have to break the silence.

Platform-specific scam patterns

Every messenger has its own preferred scam shapes. Here is what we see most often on the platforms our users actually mention by name. Thorn and NCMEC's June 2024 Trends in Financial Sextortion report found Instagram (45.1%) and Snapchat (31.6%) as the two most common platforms where offenders first contacted sextortion victims, with Telegram, WhatsApp, and Kik used later in the funnel. Each platform on sextext has its own usernames page where verified profiles live alongside our moderation notes.

Instagram scam patterns

Instagram is the single most common scam starting point in 2025. A fresh account with a few polished photos slides into your DMs, compliments your post, and within a few exchanges pushes you onto Telegram or Snapchat. The account often has fewer than 100 followers or a suspiciously even follow/following ratio. Flag to Meta via Settings, Report, Scam or Fraud. Instagram's team actions these quickly but the account is usually disposable. For real sextext matches, username-sharing stays on our moderated feed, not on cold Instagram DMs.

Snapchat scam patterns

Snapchat scams usually open with a push to move to Telegram "because it is more private for adults." The account has a full story feed of polished photos. Sometimes those photos come from a real OnlyFans creator whose work was stolen. They will send a few cheap photos to build trust, then ask for payment. CashApp, Zelle, Venmo, or a crypto wallet. The paid content never shows up. On Snapchat specifically, the Report button actually works. Snap's team actions reports within a day. If you are looking for real users, browse Snapchat usernames on sextext where every profile goes through our 12-layer filter.

Telegram scam patterns

Telegram is the native habitat of pig butchering group chats. If you have been added to a group called something like "VIP Wealth Elite Forum" or "Fortune Pioneer Club," with dozens of members posting profit screenshots and a "professor" dropping daily signals, leave. Telegram does not warn you when someone adds you to a group. That is why scammers pick it. Change your settings now: Privacy, then Groups, then My Contacts. Scammers lose the ability to add you at all. For verified connections, browse Telegram usernames on sextext. All moderated, none added to spam groups.

WhatsApp scam patterns

On WhatsApp, the scam arrives as a random text that reads like a wrong number: "Hi John, are we still on for Thursday?" Reply and they pivot straight into friendly conversation. Over days, they shift the chat toward money. A family member in crypto. An investment group chat you should join. Turn on WhatsApp's "only my contacts can add me to groups" setting under Settings, Privacy, Groups. That one change stops most of these cold. Looking for real matches? See verified WhatsApp usernames on sextext.

Kik scam patterns

Kik is a favorite for sextortion because accounts are nearly anonymous and there is no phone number attached. The playbook is simple: quick intimacy, a request for explicit photos, then a threat to send them to your contacts. Kik has a brief unsend window, but cannot retrieve a message once the recipient has screenshot or saved it. If this has happened to you, treat it like any other sextortion. Screenshot first. Don't pay. Report. Tell one person. If you need sextext to take down content that already leaked, use our content removal request form and we respond within 48 hours. For safer connections, browse Kik usernames on sextext.

Is he a scammer? Is she a scammer? Reverse image search in 3 steps.

The fastest way to catch a fake profile is to find out where the photos actually came from. Most scammer accounts are built on photos stolen off Instagram, X, OnlyFans, or LinkedIn accounts of real people who have nothing to do with the scam. Here is how to do a reverse image search in under two minutes, on any device.

Save one of their photos. On mobile, long-press the image and hit save. On desktop, right-click and save image. If the photo lives inside a private messenger, screenshot it and crop tight to the face.
Search all three engines. One engine is not enough. They index different corners of the web. Use Google Images (camera icon, or hold down the image in Chrome on iPhone and pick "Search image with Google"), TinEye (great at exact duplicates), and Yandex Images (unusually good at faces). Upload the same image to each.
Check the matches. If the photo shows up on a real person's Instagram, a stock photo site, a modeling portfolio, or an OnlyFans under a different name, you are looking at identity theft. A real person's photos powering a fake profile. If the photo shows up on catfish-tracking sites like romancescam.com or socialcatfish.com, someone has already reported this account.

How to reverse image search on iPhone. Safari users: tap and hold the photo, pick "Share," scroll to "Search Image with Google." Chrome users: tap and hold the photo in Chrome, pick "Search image with Google." If you do not see the option, upload to images.google.com through mobile Safari and tap the camera icon. The same photo can then be searched on TinEye and Yandex from that phone. No app install needed.

What about AI-generated photos? Reverse search catches stolen photos. It does not catch fabricated ones. By 2026, scammers routinely mix the two. When you get zero hits on all three engines, look for AI tells instead of assuming safety. Asymmetric earrings or glasses. Fingers that count wrong. Hair melting into a necklace. Teeth blending together. Background elements that do not connect (a doorframe ending in mid-air, a bookshelf with jumbled spines). Skin with no pores or scars at all. Tools like Hive AI Content Detection score photos for AI probability, though no detector is perfect.

One closing caveat. Neither check is a clean bill of health on its own. Reverse search works on stolen photos. It does not work on AI faces that were never on the public web in the first place. AI detection tools help but are not perfect, especially on high-quality diffusion model output. Use both tools together with the red-flag signals from the quiz. Photo provenance plus behavioral pattern is the combination that catches fake profiles most reliably.

Safe sexting in 2026: what to share, when to escalate trust

The quiz above catches scammers. This section catches the bigger risk: you, sharing too much too fast with someone you have not yet checked. Sextext is built for anonymous sexting, and the safest users follow a few habits that keep it that way.

What never to share on a first exchange

Your real name, last name, or employer.
Your address, neighborhood, or photos where the street sign, house number, license plate, or office logo is visible.
Your face in the same frame as anything sexual. Crop or angle so the image cannot be linked back to you if it leaks.
Distinctive permanent features in nude photos: tattoos, birthmarks, scars. These are what reverse image searches and screenshot-based blackmail campaigns lean on.
Personal documents, ID cards, or bank details. No legitimate partner needs to see your passport to start chatting.

How trust should build, in stages

Treat the first few days as casual text. Words only. If the person is real and not running a script, they will be comfortable at this pace.

Before sending any nude or explicit content, ask for a verification photo with a custom pose you pick on the spot. A specific hand signal, a word written on paper, today's date with your nickname. A scammer using stolen or AI photos cannot produce this on demand. Most real users will send it within a few minutes of being asked.

Voice notes used to be the next step. In 2026 they are no longer enough on their own. AI voice cloning tools like ElevenLabs and OpenAI Voice Engine can now clone a convincing voice from a short audio sample. CrowdStrike's 2025 Global Threat Report logged a 442% jump in voice-phishing attacks between the first and second halves of 2024, and Resemble AI's Q1 2025 Deepfake Incident Report counted more than $200 million in deepfake-enabled fraud losses in that single quarter. If you want a voice check, ask for a short voice note reading a sentence you pick that moment, including a current event or a specific emoji pronounced out loud. Generic voice notes are cheap to fake. Live, prompt-reactive notes are not.

Video calls: still useful, but no longer perfect. Real-time deepfake video is no longer theoretical. Scammers can generate convincing faces for live video chats. The FBI warned about criminals using generative AI for real-time video chat impersonation in its December 3, 2024 public service advisory (IC3 PSA241203). Tells to watch for: glitches when the person turns their head quickly, a weirdly smooth hairline, unnatural blinking, requests to keep the call in very low light or low resolution, audio that falls out of sync with the mouth. If anything feels off, ask them to rotate their head 90 degrees or wave a hand briefly across their face. Most current real-time deepfakes break under fast motion. Video is still optional on sextext; some users stay anonymous forever, and that is a valid choice.

Sharing photos and short videos without getting burned

A lot of sexting today is video-first. Short clips on Snapchat. Quick flashes on Kik. Disappearing videos on Telegram. Adult use is mainstream, and video-based sexting has grown year over year. The safety rules for video are the same as for photos, with a few extras:

Disappearing isn't gone. Snapchat videos can be screen-recorded from another device held up to the phone, which bypasses the in-app capture warning entirely. Treat every clip as if it will be saved.
Short clips are easy to frame-grab. A two-second flash on Snap gives someone 60 still frames to pick through. Angle matters more than length.
Keep your face out of the same frame as anything explicit. Crop, tilt, or angle. If the clip leaks, frame-level anonymity is what stops it from being linked back to your name.
Watch the background. A visible bedroom poster, a university hoodie, a street sign through the window, a reflection in a mirror or screen. Any of these are identifiers. Blur or physically block them before filming.
Nudify and deepnude apps. In 2026, free apps can take a fully clothed photo of you and produce a convincing fake nude in seconds. A Tech Transparency Project audit published in January 2026 found 55 of these apps on Google Play and 47 on the App Store, with 705 million combined downloads and $117 million in lifetime revenue. Thirty-one of them were rated suitable for minors. This means even a regular clothed selfie, sent to someone you do not yet trust, can be weaponized into fake sextortion. The red-flag quiz question about threats to share your photos includes threats to share fake ones.

Platform privacy settings worth turning on right now

Snapchat. Settings, Privacy Control. Set "Who can contact me" to "My friends." Turn on "Ghost Mode" under Snap Map so your location is not broadcast.
Telegram. Settings, Privacy and Security. Restrict "Who can add me to groups" to "My Contacts." Hide your phone number from everyone. Turn off "Forwarded Messages" link-back.
WhatsApp. Settings, Privacy, Groups. Allow only contacts to add you to groups. Under "Last Seen" and "Profile Photo," pick "My Contacts" or "Nobody."
Signal. Settings, Privacy. Turn on "Disappearing Messages" on a timer (24 hours is a reasonable default for casual chat).
Kik. Do not link your Kik username to any account that uses your real name or email. Kik accounts are anonymous by default; keep it that way.

If content gets out anyway

Tools exist to contain a leak. Use StopNCII.org if you are 18 or over. It hashes your photos locally on your phone and shares the hash (not the image) with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bumble, OnlyFans, Reddit, and others, so matching copies get blocked automatically. If you are under 18, use NCMEC's Take It Down instead. On sextext specifically, file a content removal request and we respond within 48 hours.

What to do right now

If anything on this page matches your situation, the next hour matters more than the next week. This is the sequence we give sextext users when they message support.

Stop responding. Stop talking to them. Every reply confirms your number, email, or account is real and active. That information gets sold to other scammer groups. Silence is worth more than a clever comeback.
Screenshot the conversation. Take full-scroll screenshots of the entire thread. Profile, bio, every message, every image, every link. Those screenshots are your evidence. Upload them to cloud storage so you still have them if your phone gets lost.
Reverse image search their photos. Open Google Images, TinEye, and Yandex. Upload their profile photos to each one. If the same photos turn up on a real person's account under a different name, you are looking at confirmed identity theft.
Block them everywhere. Block the account on every platform where they reached you. Don't “quietly unmatch” to avoid confrontation. Block them hard, so the conversation is over.
Report to the platform. If they contacted you on sextext, Snapchat, Kik, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Instagram, report the account. On sextext, use the Report button on the post. We investigate daily and ban within hours.
File with IC3 (US) or your country equivalent. US: file at ic3.gov, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Canada: CAFC at antifraudcentre.ca. UK: Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk. Australia: Scamwatch at scamwatch.gov.au. These agencies pool reports across victims to build cases.
If you sent crypto, notify the exchange. Contact Coinbase, Binance, Crypto.com, or whichever exchange you used. They can't reverse the transaction, but they can flag the wallet that received your funds. Some exchanges freeze deposits once enough victims report the same address.
Tell someone you trust. Pig butchering and sextortion work partly because victims feel too ashamed to say anything out loud. Shame is what keeps the operation running. Tell one person. A partner, a friend, a sibling. You don't have to show them the messages. You just have to break the silence.

A note on links they send you. Do not click any link they send. Not the investment site. Not the “verification” page. Not the cute video they claim to have made for you. Scammer links fall into three buckets: lookalike domains (binanc-login.com, faceb0ok-support.com) that steal your credentials, tracking pixels that confirm your number or email is live so they can sell it, and occasionally malware that siphons crypto wallet keys or installs a remote access tool. If you have already clicked, change the password on any account you logged in to afterward and run a malware scan. On iOS specifically, force- close the browser and clear its history and data.

None of the action steps cost anything. None of them require a lawyer. They are the same steps the FBI’s IC3 and the FTC recommend. They are also the steps that actually work, based on every sextext user who came to us mid-scam and recovered something.

Why sextext built this quiz

Sextext.me is a platform where adults share messaging usernames to find sexting partners. That puts us directly in the scammers' path. We see the same patterns daily. Over the past two years we have built a twelve-layer content filter, banned tens of thousands of accounts, and read every new scam script as it evolved. This quiz is what we would say to a friend in the first five minutes if they forwarded us a suspicious DM.

We are not a law firm and we are not the police. If you have lost money, the agencies listed above are set up to help you recover it. What we are is a platform run by people who have had this exact conversation hundreds of times. We cannot stop every scammer. We can help you recognize one sooner.

If this helped you, the best thing you can do is forward the link to anyone else it might help. When you are ready for verified connections instead of cold DMs, browse real users on sextext or post your own username. If you want to read more about how sextext is moderated, the terms and privacy policy spell out the rules we apply to every account.