The FTC issued an alert this month about a category of fraud with a particularly nasty design: scams that target people who have already been scammed.
They're called refund and recovery scams. Someone contacts you claiming they can get back the money you lost — and takes more of it.
How the pitch works
The mechanics are consistent. Someone reaches out to a fraud victim offering to recover the stolen funds. To begin, they need a fee, described as a retainer, a processing fee, or an administrative charge.
Sometimes the offer is dressed up with specifics: they'll file complaint paperwork on your behalf, or expedite a reimbursement that's already in process. They may also ask for your Social Security number or bank account details, explaining that they need somewhere to deposit the recovered money.
None of it is real. There is no recovery process, no paperwork, no pending refund.
Why victims get contacted twice
This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why being scammed once raises your odds of being scammed again.
Fraudsters buy and trade lists of previous victims — known in the trade as sucker lists. Everyone on that list has been independently verified as three things: reachable, willing to send money to a stranger, and carrying a loss they desperately want undone. As a target profile, it's better than anything cold outreach can produce.
That last quality is what the pitch is engineered around. Recovery scams work on hope, not fear, which is why people who consider themselves alert to fraud still fall for them. AARP has documented this second-round targeting for years, and research from Stanford's longevity centre has found the same pattern among older consumers, who are approached not once but twice.
The impersonation layer
Recovery scammers rarely present as strangers with an offer. They pose as law firms, consumer advocacy groups, or government agencies, because credibility is what makes the fee request plausible.
Some impersonate the FTC directly. The agency has been explicit about what it will never do: it will never threaten you, never tell you that you must transfer money to protect it, and never instruct you to withdraw cash or buy gold and hand it to someone.
That last instruction sounds too strange to work until you understand it usually arrives after weeks of contact from someone posing as an official helping you.
The signals that identify it
Three things mark a recovery pitch, and any one is enough to stop.
An upfront fee. No legitimate recovery process requires payment before results — not a government agency, not a law firm, not a consumer group.
Pressure to decide immediately. Urgency exists to prevent you from checking, which is exactly why it's applied.
A request for personal or financial data. Your Social Security number and bank details are the objective, not administrative necessity.
If you've already lost money
Report it to the FTC, and to your bank or card issuer if a payment was involved. That's the actual process, and it costs nothing.
Then expect the follow-up call. Someone will contact you offering to fix it, and they will sound helpful and official. Assume that anyone who approaches you unprompted about recovering scammed money is running the second half of the same scam.
The FTC has flagged this as an active threat, and some fraud analysts expect recovery scams to rank among the year's most prevalent. The one useful reflex: no legitimate recovery of stolen money begins with you paying a fee to a stranger who contacted you first.
Image: Gustavo Fring, via Pexels
