How to Report Email Fraud and Spam to Authorities
Where to Report Email Fraud in the US
If you receive a fraudulent email and live in the United States, you can report it to both the FBI and the FTC.
For the FBI, visit the IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center). There, you can file a complaint. Click the FAQ link to see some details about what a complaint entails. The page is intended for people who have been victims of online crime, but you can fill out the details even if you haven’t fallen for anything.
Next, you should also consider filing a complaint with the FTC. Select a category from the left side and walk through the steps to put your report into the correct category.
Finally, you can also report email fraud to your state’s consumer protection office. Visit USA.gov’s State Consumer Protection Offices page to find the information for your state.
How to Report Email Fraud in Canada
Residents of Canada should head to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre’s Report fraud page. This will walk you though reporting what happened.
Note that you’ll need to sign in with an approved partner account (such as a bank) or create a new GCKey account.
How to Report Email Fraud in the UK
If you live in the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre asks that you forward phishing emails to the Suspicious Email Reporting Service: [email protected].
Reporting Email Fraud in Australia
Those in Australia should head to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch form.
Reporting Email Fraud to the Impersonated Company
While it’s a good idea to let the appropriate authorities about email fraud, it’s not the only step you can take. Agencies like the FBI probably won’t respond to what you file using their forms, and they can’t help you recover money if you handed it over to scammers.
If you receive a fraudulent email pretending to be from a certain company, you should report it to the real company. You’ll find contact info for most businesses on their website, and some have a dedicated email address for forwarding fraudulent messages.
For instance, Amazon’s suspicious communication page has instructions for reporting scam messages. It asks you to forward fraud emails to [email protected]. PayPal requests that you forward fake emails to [email protected].
Hopefully, the company in question can have a team look into the specific scam in an attempt to shut it down. If many people report it, they’ll be more likely to start investigating.
Report Email Fraud to the Email Provider
The last step of reporting scam emails is to let the email service know. Companies like Google and Microsoft don’t want malicious users taking advantage of their services to rip people off.
Most email services have an option for reporting phishing messages, as well as options to report accounts that break the rules. Let’s look at a few of the most popular ones.
How to Report Fraud in Gmail
In Gmail, you can click the three-dot menu to the right of any message and choose Report phishing. This will remove the email from your inbox and report the danger to Google.
If the fraudulent email came from a Gmail address, you can also use the Gmail abuse reporting form. This helps Google investigate people using the service for illicit means.
How to Report Email Fraud to Yahoo
Unfortunately, Yahoo Mail doesn’t have simple reporting tools like Gmail does. You can mark an email as spam in your Yahoo Mail account, but there’s no option to report fraud or phishing.
Yahoo’s help pages direct you to Yahoo Support to report security issues, but at the time of writing, this wasn’t working properly. Your results with it may vary.
How to Report Email Scams in Outlook
If you use Outlook on the web, open an email and select Junk > Phishing > Report to let Microsoft know about the problem.
Microsoft has a dedicated email address for reporting phishing. Create a new email message and drag the scam message into it to add it as an attachment. Then send the message to [email protected] so the company can take a look.
