Tools
The fraud-protection tools and services Mark Tell recommends. Some are free. Some are paid. The page tells you which is which.
Last reviewed: April 2026
This is the page MarkTell sends readers to when a piece ends and the question becomes, what do I do now?
The recommendations below are organised by the situation you are trying to address: deciding whether to send money, recovering after you already did, protecting a parent or family member, or hardening the basic infrastructure that gets exploited first in every fraud scenario. There is also a short reading list.
Some entries on this page involve a referral fee. Where you click through one of those links and become a customer of a paid service we recommend, MarkTell may receive a fee. Every entry that involves a referral fee is marked. The fee never changes what we recommend or whether we recommend it; tools that pay us are not given preference over tools that do not. The page is reviewed quarterly. Tools that stop meeting the standard are removed.
The full sponsorship policy lives in Editorial Standards § XI.
I. Before you invest
If money has not yet moved, the most valuable minute you will spend is on a free regulator database. The people running real shops will not be offended that you looked them up. The people running other things will go quiet when you say you did.
FINRA BrokerCheck
Search any registered broker by name or firm. Past complaints, regulatory actions, employment history. If a person selling you investments does not show up here at all, that is the answer to your question.
Visit FINRA BrokerCheck →SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure
The same idea for investment advisers, who register with the SEC instead of FINRA. Free, fast, and the disclosures are the actual filed documents, not summaries.
Visit SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure →Your state securities regulator
Most states maintain a Department of Securities or Bureau of Securities Regulation with online complaint records. NASAA links to all of them. State regulators often have files the federal databases miss, especially on smaller offerings.
Visit Your state securities regulator →II. If you have already been hit
No one in this category is here because they did something stupid. The machine is built by professionals and run at scale. What matters now is reporting, freezing, and protecting the next thing they will try.
FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
The primary federal intake for fraud complaints. File this even if you think the loss is small. The FBI uses these complaints to identify pattern operations across victims who do not know each other.
Visit FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) →FTC ReportFraud.ftc.gov
Federal Trade Commission complaint portal. Faster intake than the FBI, broader scope (covers everything from rental scams to investment fraud). File here in addition to the FBI; they share with state agencies.
Visit FTC ReportFraud.ftc.gov →SEC Tips, Complaints, and Referrals
If the loss involves securities, stocks, bonds, ETFs, crypto sold as an investment, private placements, the SEC wants the report. They cannot recover your money but they can stop the operation from running on the next person.
Visit SEC Tips, Complaints, and Referrals →Your State Attorney General consumer protection division
Each state has one. The state AG can move faster than federal agencies on local cases and can pursue civil recovery on behalf of victims. NAAG links to every state.
Visit Your State Attorney General consumer protection division →Recovery scam services
A warning, not a recommendation. If anyone reaches out offering recovery services on losses you reported on social media or anywhere public, they are running the second scam in the cycle. Real recovery happens through law enforcement, court-appointed receivers in class actions, and licensed attorneys you found independently. Anyone else asking for an upfront fee is selling the same thing again.
III. Protecting someone you love
If a parent or family member is the one being targeted, the tools that work are the ones designed for that specific situation, not generic identity monitoring. The two below are the ones I have actually seen work.
True Link Card
A prepaid debit card for someone who can no longer safely manage their own money but needs the dignity of having a card in their wallet. The family member sets the spending controls, store types, amounts, automatic blocks. The single best tool I know for this specific situation.
Visit True Link Card →Eversafe
Continuous monitoring of bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial activity for an aging family member, with alerts to designated family members. Built around the patterns that matter, sudden charges, unusual transfers, social-engineering signatures, rather than the noise of generic identity monitoring.
Visit Eversafe →AARP Fraud Watch Helpline
Helpline (877-908-3360) staffed by trained fraud specialists. Talking it through with a person is sometimes the best first step before doing anything else. Free, no AARP membership required.
Visit AARP Fraud Watch Helpline →Freeze credit at all three bureaus
Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion all offer credit freezes for free, by federal law. A freeze stops new credit from being opened in someone's name, the most common follow-on damage after personal information is compromised. Each bureau's freeze portal is one search away. The single highest-value action and it costs nothing.
IV. General hygiene
Tools that lower the cost of every fraud scenario by hardening the things that get exploited first. None of these will save you from a determined social-engineering operation. All of them will save you from the lazier ones.
Bitwarden
Open-source password manager. The free tier covers personal use; paid plans add family sharing and emergency access. The reason it matters: most fraud cycles include a credential-stuffing component, and reused passwords are the door.
Visit Bitwarden →1Password
If Bitwarden's open-source UI does not suit you, 1Password is the polished alternative. Family plan covers up to five accounts. Both apps do the same job; the difference is the experience.
Visit 1Password →Aura
Identity theft monitoring with credit-bureau alerts, dark-web exposure scans, and recovery support. Worth it primarily if your information has been part of a breach, which by now is most American adults. Skip the cheaper alternatives that lock the useful features behind upsells.
Visit Aura →V. Reading
Books that taught me how to see fraud as a structure rather than as a story about bad people. The four below are the ones I return to.
Lying for Money — Dan Davies
The single best general book on the structure of financial fraud. Davies categorises the cons by their underlying mechanism, which is exactly the lens MarkTell uses. Required reading.
Visit Lying for Money — Dan Davies →The Big Con — David Maurer
The 1940 anthropological study of confidence-game architecture. Most modern frauds are recombinations of the patterns Maurer documented eighty-five years ago. Reads like fiction; was research.
Visit The Big Con — David Maurer →Bad Blood — John Carreyrou
Theranos. The reporting that brought it down. A case study in how a charisma-stock pitch survived as long as it did despite the underlying technology not working.
Visit Bad Blood — John Carreyrou →Billion Dollar Whale — Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
The 1MDB story. Sovereign-wealth fraud at a scale most readers will never have considered possible, with named players still moving through the global financial system.
Visit Billion Dollar Whale — Tom Wright and Bradley Hope →VI. A note on this page
The list is short on purpose. Adding a tool requires that we have used it ourselves or watched it work in cases we covered. We remove tools that change ownership, stop meeting the standard, or develop business practices we cannot recommend. The most recent review date appears at the top.
If a tool you trust is missing and you think it should be on this page, write to editor@marktell.com with the name, the situation it solves, and your experience using it. We read every suggestion. We do not accept pitches from vendors.