Transparency Report

Each edition of this report gives the calendar year it covers and the date its figures were drawn up.

When a figure is later corrected or materially revised, the revised edition says so. We will not present an old figure as a current one, and we will not merge two periods in a way that changes the picture.

We publish totals for the dossiers, investigations and reports that went live during the year, and for how many were later updated, corrected, restricted or withdrawn. We may also show the jurisdictions and broad subjects the work touched.

The totals tell you how much we produced. They say nothing about how much fraud, misconduct or enforcement there was among the people and firms we wrote about.

We may report how many sources our records cited and which kinds we leaned on most, such as court judgments, regulator decisions, Companies House filings, official records, interviews and material sent in by readers.

Giving a total never commits us to naming a confidential source, releasing unpublished evidence or privileged correspondence, or disclosing anything the law prevents us from disclosing.

We report how many subjects were given the chance to respond before critical material was published, and how many sent a substantive answer.

A refusal to comment, or no reply at all, is not presented as an admission, as evidence of wrongdoing or as confirmation of what we put to them.

Occasionally it is unsafe, legally restricted or impractical to approach a subject first. We will not take that risk just to improve a figure on this page.

We report how many requests for correction or amendment arrived and, where we can, how each one ended: a material correction, a clarification, an update, a change of grade, a restriction, a removal, or no substantive change.

A correction repairs an error. An update records something that happened afterwards. A record that was accurate on the day it went live does not become inaccurate because events moved on.

We publish totals for requests to remove or hide published material. Where we can, we break them down by ground: a factual error, privacy or data protection, live proceedings, a court order, mistaken identity, later events, and requests made mainly to protect a reputation.

None of this will disclose confidential legal correspondence or prejudice proceedings that are still under way.

UK Scam does not take money, gifts, favours or any other benefit in return for removing, hiding, delaying, toning down or materially changing accurate reporting.

Where someone makes a credible attempt to pay for an outcome or to steer one improperly, we may record it internally and, where the law allows, include the total here. Offering or accepting a bribe is a criminal offence under the Bribery Act 2010.

We will not describe an ordinary correction request, an offer to settle or a solicitor’s letter as bribery or improper pressure unless the facts and the law clearly support that description.

We receive letters before claim, demands to correct or remove material, data protection requests under the UK GDPR, court orders, witness summonses and other formal legal correspondence.

Where it is lawful and causes no harm to proceedings, privilege, confidentiality or anyone’s rights, we may publish how many arrived and what general kind they were.

We also do not dismiss a demand because it comes from a subject or their solicitors. Each one is weighed on its legal and factual merits.

UK Scam may earn income from Research Membership and from professional research services, including access to Tracer.

Membership gives nobody a right, contractual or otherwise, to have a record removed, a grade changed, publication stopped, coverage softened or a correction made that the evidence does not support.

Where it helps readers understand how the site is funded, we may publish membership numbers and the income they bring in.

We name the main categories of income behind our work, subject to genuine confidentiality and legal limits.

Where a funder, investor, member, sponsor, commercial partner or other financial tie creates a material conflict in a particular matter, it goes through the Conflict Register and our internal procedure. Any single source providing more than 5% of annual revenue is treated as material.

We will not leave out a financial relationship if leaving it out would mislead readers about our independence.

Material organisational conflicts identified during the year are handled under the UK Scam Conflict Register.

This report may give totals for conflicts identified, recusals and other safeguards applied, without disclosing private or confidential detail.

A conflict does not by itself make a piece of reporting unreliable.

Research Members may send evidence and ask us to look again at an existing record, so we are open about how those requests are kept apart from editorial decisions.

We may publish how many review requests members made and how many ended in a correction, an amendment or no substantive change.

Those figures let anyone confirm that paying for membership does not buy a better result.

Where Tracer or another restricted system is opened to approved public bodies, police forces or legal professionals, we may publish totals for that access where it is lawful and operationally safe to do so.

We will not disclose anything that could identify a confidential inquiry, weaken operational security, expose protected research or obstruct lawful official work.

Access to our systems does not mean UK Scam endorses a user’s investigation, conclusions or later actions.

We may describe in general terms how non-public evidence, confidential submissions and restricted research systems are handled, for example access limited by role, identity checks, access logs and internal permissions.

We will not publish technical detail that could help someone get into or interfere with our systems.

Some of our information comes from confidential sources and whistleblowers.

Nothing in this report requires us to name a protected source, or to publish anything that could reasonably identify one, where doing so would be unlawful, unsafe, contrary to an undertaking we gave, or inconsistent with proper source protection.

Where we are allowed to, we may give totals for requests for information received from government departments, regulators or police during the year.

Whether we can confirm that a particular request exists, or say what it asked for, depends on the law, any court order, our duties of confidentiality and the facts.

We make no promise to publish anything the law forbids us to disclose.

Each edition carries a publication date and a version number.

If we later find a material factual error in it, we correct it under the same rules as our records and mark the change, rather than quietly swapping one number for another.

We do not undertake to disclose confidential sources, privileged legal advice, protected personal data, unpublished investigative material, information restricted by a court, security-sensitive detail, or anything whose release would put a person at unjustified risk.

We may also withhold information where releasing it would damage a live investigation, interfere with legal proceedings or breach a legal duty.

The absence of something from this report neither confirms nor denies that it exists.

The figures for the chosen year are in the ledger at the top of this report. A green square marks a figure counted from our records at the moment the page loads. An ochre square marks a figure entered by the editors. “Not recorded” means no figure has been entered yet. It does not mean nil.