Free tools that do one thing brilliantly

Why SignalTools

Built different on purpose.

Scam guides

Free, plain-English guides for the scams doing the rounds in the UK right now.

View all guides on ScamSupport →

Why we build these tools

The internet is full of bloated services that demand an account, harvest your data, and lock the useful features behind a paywall. Most people don't need a "platform" — they need to answer one specific question right now: is this email a scam, is this link safe, is my information being misused. The SignalTools project is a small, deliberate set of single-purpose tools for those moments. No sign-up, no tracking, no upsell.

Each tool is designed to give you a useful answer in under sixty seconds. ScamSupport — our flagship — runs a trained machine-learning model entirely inside your browser, so the message you paste in never leaves your device. The 18 KB model file loads once, then inference takes 2–3 milliseconds per check. We deliberately built it this way because a privacy-first scam checker that asks for your email and uploads your messages to a server would defeat the whole point.

Funding comes from non-intrusive ads on the educational pages and a single opt-in affiliate link to NordVPN. There's no premium tier, there's no plan to add one, and the core detection will always be free. If you find ScamSupport useful, the most valuable thing you can do is tell a family member who'd never go looking for a tool like this on their own — most of the people who lose money to scams are the ones who never knew this kind of check was available.

If a tool you wish existed isn't listed yet, send us a note via the contact page. The roadmap is short and intentional — we'd rather build five tools that work brilliantly than fifty that all do 40% of the job.

What SignalTools covers

Three areas, deliberately limited, deeply done.

Scam recognition

The largest part of the site: detailed guides on the specific scam patterns currently circulating in the UK. Brand-impersonation texts (Royal Mail, DPD, Evri, HMRC, your bank), email phishing campaigns, WhatsApp “Hi Mum” and OTP-hijack scams, romance and investment fraud, fake job offers, recovery scams, quishing (QR-code fraud), and the many smaller scam patterns hitting UK inboxes and phones each week. Each guide names the exact patterns to look for, explains why they work, includes worked examples drawn from real campaigns, and gives a practical “what to do if you have already engaged” section. When the law or the regulator changes — Action Fraud being replaced by Report Fraud in December 2025, the FSCS deposit-protection limit rising from £85,000 to £120,000 in the same month, the mandatory APP-fraud reimbursement scheme launching in October 2024 — we work through the affected pages and re-date them, with the source cited at the foot of each.

Recovery routes

For people who have already been scammed, the recovery section walks through what to do, and in what order: contact your bank first on 159 (Stop Scams UK) before doing anything else; claim a refund under the PSR mandatory reimbursement scheme for an in-scope authorised-push-payment loss; use chargeback or Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act for card payments; escalate to the Financial Ombudsman Service if your bank refuses; apply for CIFAS Protective Registration if your identity details have been exposed; and get non-financial support from Victim Support and Citizens Advice. The recovery side of the internet is itself full of fake “recovery agents” charging upfront fees to people who have already lost money — recovery scams are their own category — so we keep the recovery section anchored to the genuine, free, public routes and explicitly flag the routes that are not.

Prevention and protective set-up

Smaller in volume but high in value: the protective steps that defeat whole classes of scam at once, rather than reacting after one has landed. A password manager that remembers the real domain a credential belongs to and refuses to auto-fill on a lookalike; multi-factor authentication on email and banking accounts; the FCA Financial Services Register check before sending money to an unfamiliar investment firm; carrier-level scam-call filtering (free with every major UK mobile network); a family safe-word for voice-clone-resistant verification of a panicked phone call; CIFAS Protective Registration as a credit-file lock against identity fraud. A small set of one-time configurations producing protection that compounds.

Frequently asked questions