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The free tool below runs entirely in this browser — no account, nothing stored or transmitted. Redact anything you would not want kept before you type it.
Open the companion tool →Why the payment route decides everything
Card payments, and most bank transfers, come with some combination of dispute process, reversibility, and a named recipient. Gift cards and prepaid cards arrive with none of those: the code is the value, whoever reads it out keeps it, and there is no merchant to dispute with afterwards.
Scammers do not choose gift cards because they are convenient. They choose them because the ask ends the moment the code is spoken — no authorization step, no fraud team, no name attached. That is why this reading focuses on the instruction rather than the story around it.
The protocol
- Find the payment instruction in the message. If the value moves by gift card, prepaid card, or a code read aloud over the phone, treat everything else in the message as packaging.
- Ask what the money buys and who receives it. A real bill, fee, or fine can be paid through a named account you can look up independently.
- Do not read a code to anyone, and do not photograph a card. No legitimate organization needs the numbers off the back of a gift card.
- If a person you know appears to be asking, hang up and call them on a number you already had — the voice or text thread is not the channel that verifies them.
What the tool does
Paste a payment request you received and get a route reading: which channel the value moves through, what recovery exists on that channel, and the exact sentences to decline. It runs in this browser; nothing is sent or stored.
Limit first: This is a payment-route aid, not a fraud investigation service. It can miss a pattern and it can flag a legitimate request. A clean reading never proves a request is real.
Open the companion tool →One human next step
If you already read a code out, contact the card issuer immediately — some issuers can freeze an unused balance. Then report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and ic3.gov, and keep the card and the message.
Research log and safety checks
AI-assist path: not used for a verdict. The reading is a transparent rule set over the instruction's route — a remote model would add an opaque judgment where the reader needs to see which sentence closes the recovery door. §6.10: not a frontier-pace topic.
§0.5 protection result: category is scam-fraud-defense; crisis-adjacent: no; fear/urgency/scarcity toolkit used: no. The protective function is free and the paid feature is convenience only.