What this desk is, and what it can’t do for you.

We are journalists at Mencari News in Australia. We are not police, not a bank, and not your lawyer. This page says plainly what that means.

Why this desk exists

Nearly every scam warning published in this country answers one question: how do I stop money leaving my account? It is good advice, and it leaves a hole. A large share of scam activity depends on money going the other way — arriving in ordinary accounts, briefly, on its way to somewhere it cannot be traced.

The people whose accounts are used are called money mules. Most of them did not know that is what they were, because the recruitment is professional and the story attached to the money is always reasonable. They find out when the account is frozen. This desk exists to move that discovery earlier.

What we can do

• Name the pattern your situation matches, and explain how it usually runs.
• Tell you which steps actually change the outcome, in the order that matters.
• Point you at the official Australian channel for your situation, free of charge.
• Publish anonymised case files so the pattern is easier to recognise next time.

What we cannot do

• Recover money. Nobody on this site can, and anyone who says they can, for a fee, is running the second scam.
• Give you legal or financial advice. We describe patterns; a lawyer advises you.
• Investigate, or contact anyone on your behalf. Reports go to Scamwatch, ReportCyber and your bank.
• Tell you that you are safe. Only your bank can confirm where money in your account came from.

How we use AI, and where it stops

The explainer on Check your situation is written with help from an AI model. Three constraints sit around it, and they are in the code rather than in a policy document:

• The pattern and the risk level are decided by the desk’s own rules, from the structure of what you told us — not by the model. The model writes the explanation of that decision.
• The model cannot lower a risk level, and an answer that tells you a situation is fine is discarded before you see it. If nothing valid comes back, you get the desk’s rules-based answer instead of an error.
• Every result says which of the two answered you. An editor does not review it before you read it, and the page says so.

What happens to what you type

Before your description leaves the page, we strip anything that looks like an account number, BSB, card number, email address, phone number, tax file number or crypto wallet.

If you leave the consent box unticked — which is how it starts — nothing you wrote is stored at all. If you tick it, a redacted copy is kept where only newsroom staff can read it, so an editor can write a case file. Case files are rewritten from scratch. We never publish what you typed, and we delete your submission on request.

Editorial standards

• Case files marked Composite are assembled from several reports and public documentation. They are not a real individual’s file, and the label appears on the page, not in the small print.
• We link out to other people’s reporting rather than rehosting it, and our own interpretation is kept visibly separate from their summary.
• We take no money from banks, security vendors, recovery services or law firms for coverage on this desk.
• Corrections are permanent and dated. We do not quietly edit a page that was wrong.