The Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.

SCARS Core Values

1) Honesty & Truth

  • Honesty is telling the people we support what their situation really is and what has happened to them regardless of the emotional filters and bias.
  • Honesty is also sharing the experience of our professionals and victims in:
    • Mistakes victims make – not to blame but to acknowledge.
    • Seeing the truth through the haze of emotion.
    • Recognize that there are multiple paths out of a scam, but not all of them deliver the victim to recovery, many distract the victim into future scams or an anger or denial driven life.
    • Help victims recognize their own destructive behaviors in order to change them.
    • Help victims understand the depth of their physical, emotional, and intellectual subjugation to their scam.
  • Truth is sharing reality in all situations and circumstances.

2) Consistency & Persistence

  • Consistency is the establishment of boundaries, standards, rules, and policies; and the consistent application of them over time.
  • Persistence is the sustained continuation of service, of delivering value and support.

3) Competency & Professionalism

  • Competency is about remaining true to our profession and keeping our knowledge up to date and focused on the latest information, skills and techniques as they apply to victims’ assistance.
  • Professionalism is about steadfastly focusing on knowledge and the skills needed to deliver help and support. It means that we expend focus and energy on acquiring new professional abilities and knowledge that we can use to help others.
  • Professionalism also means that we pursue our profession of crime victims’ assistance and continue to expand our knowledge, skills, and certifications relating to this field.

4) Compassion & Care

  • Compassion is about genuinely caring for a traumatized victim, being empathic and understanding of the victims’ experience.
  • Compassion is understanding that each victim has suffered a trauma and may or may not be able to recognize their own truth at the moment but avoiding emotional engagement so that consistent Care can be delivered.
  • Care means that we have a fiduciary responsibility to the victim to avoid conflicts of interest, and to help victims understand that not all services are equal or equivalent.
  • Care also means helping victims to understand threats and risks that they faced in the past and still face now and in the future.
  • Care includes a responsibility to educate victims about their experience and to acquire the knowledge to avoid it in the future – self-defense training in addition to wisdom.

5) Responsibility & Commitment

  • Responsibility relates to our willingness to help end the crimes that afflicted the victims in our care and to help prevent victimization in the future.
  • Responsibility relates to stepping in to change the situation, educating law enforcement and government about these crimes and how to interact with victims, and to actively work against the harm being done by collecting crime information and passing it to those that can execute on that information to make arrests and deter cyber-criminality.
  • Responsibility also relates to approaching and persuading government to change the environment that allows cybercrimes to exist and victimize the public.
  • Commitment is to helping social engineering relationship victims to understand what happened to them and to see a path going forward to recovery.
  • Commitment to every victim that will allow us to help them, or to refer them to services better suited when they will not.
  • Commitment to continue our own professional advancement and establishing standards of care for our practice.

6) Confidentiality & Trust

  • Confidentiality means that we have a duty to maintain the privacy of our interactions with victims consistent with the permissions that victims have provided. This means we never sell such information to third parties. It means that we respect and comply with all applicable privacy and other regulations and statutes in the performance of our services.
  • Trust means that victims know that they can trust our organization and its team members to deliver services consistent with our rules & policies.
  • Trust also means that we always attempt to provide safe places where people can feel comfortable sharing their experiences without risk of blame or exposure to online criminals.

7) Respect

  • Respect means that we acknowledge victims and professional assistance providers are people. Each goes through their own experiences and that those experiences are real and impactful, in many cases traumatizing – either directly or vicariously.
  • Respect means that we know that we cannot help everyone, but we will make the effort regardless of the outcome, and in the cases where we cannot help it means that we refer the victim to competent services and then withdraw.
  • Respect means that even when we are not respected that we will remain professionals and continue to try to engage the person to help them understand our perspective without blame.
  • Respect means that we will listen to a victim with acceptance while sharing reality and truth, even if the victim rejects our truth, that we will continue to try to maintain dialog and provide help and support if possible.
  • Respect also recognizes that we care for more than one victim and that we must always be focused on mitigating harm and making decisions or actions for the majority of those under our care.

SCARS Is Here To Be A Beacon In The Darkness For Scam Victims

The Mission of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams

Our Mission is to work tirelessly to oppose the expanding threat of international online fraud and the support it provides to global terrorism. SCARS is a global organization to coordinate political advocacy, public education and avoidance programs, have an enforcement focus, all while supporting and assisting victims and promote recovery programs, and establish best practices & standards for the professionalization of online crime victims’ assistance throughout the world.

THE SCARS MISSION

The Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams [SCARS] is a Nonprofit Nongovernmental Organization based in the United States; founded to bring positive change to the online environment. It was created to address the ever-growing threat of global criminal cartels in their expansion of online fraud and related cyber-enabled crimes. We work with governments and law enforcement worldwide to address the needs for greater enforcement, and legal & treaty changes required to bring this plague to an end.

The Four Cornerstones of Our Mission

  1. Factual & Up-To-Date Scam Awareness & Avoidance Education
  2. Professional Cyber-enabled Crime Victims’ Assistance, Support, and Recovery Programs
  3. Accurate Chain of Custody Scam Report Collection, Data Delivery & Distribution, and Analysis for Governments & Law Enforcement Worldwide
  4. Advocacy & Governmental Lobbying to Address Statutory & Treaty Changes Needed to Positively Affect the Reduction and Elimination of Online Fraud & Related Cybercrimes

More Resources

SCARS Code of Conduct

The Society requires that all members follow a Code of Conduct that establishes professional ethical behavior and conduct in their activities relating to the publication of anti-scam information, and in their interactions with victims of online crimes.

Please view our Code of Conduct and FAQs for more information.