Good question!

  • Personally, I report information about potential financial fraudsters on Twitter e.g.

PSA: +91 84862 95494 is most probably a Credit Card Reward Point Fraudster. He’ll start by saying he’s from “Credit Card Dept”. When pressed, he’ll reveal correct bank name & latest reward point balance. God only knows how he knows these things but I didn’t bother to find out.

Ketharaman Swaminathan on Twitter

  • Many Financial Institutions specify an email address where you can report information regarding potential financial fraudsters. Hopefully, they make the information public by publishing it on their website or in some other manner.
  • A few years ago, there was a startup called BillGuard in the USA that enabled its users to report potential fraudulent charges to their credit card and debit cards. The last I heard, this startup was acquired by somebody and I don’t know its current status.

But, in case you’re wondering if there’s a single, central, publicly-accessible destination for reporting information regarding financial fraudsters, I don’t know of any – in any country.

If I were to speculate on the reason why, it might have to do with defamation laws.

If you notice, I’ve used the prefix “potential” before all mentions of financial fraudsters in my answer. That’s because, at the time it happens, it’s very difficult to prove that some party is a financial fraudster, and all encounters are only potentially fraudulent.

Personally, I can do whatever I want in order to protect myself if suspect financial fraud, however unproven the fraud is, at that point in time.

But I can’t publicize my suspicions to the whole world. For all I know, my suspicions could be wrong and the genuine party may suffer a loss of reputation and / or business because of my wrong public fraud alert. In that case, the genuine party would be entitled to file a defamation lawsuit against me – and the platform that hosted my wrong public fraud alert – to recover damages.

Not surprisingly, not too many people may be interested in getting exposed to defamation lawsuits, which is probably why there are no single, central, publicly accessible destinations for reporting information regarding financial fraudsters anywhere in the world AFAIK.

In a nutshell, it’s okay to share information about financial fraud in private but not advisable to publish such information in public.