Who stands behind this

Who writes and checks it

ShieldMate is small, and we would rather say so than imply a newsroom. Everything published here is written or edited by the people named below, and nothing is published without one of them reading it.

Where we use AI, and where we do not

We use an AI model to draft things, and a person edits and approves all of it. Specifically, it drafts the headline, topic labels and content warning on a story page, and the note from ShieldMate that sits alongside an account. It flags personal information for removal, and it flags possible signs that someone writing to us is at risk, so a person sees those quickly.

It does not write, rewrite, shorten or reword anybody’s story. It does not decide what is published. It does not reply to anyone. Where a guide or a news post carries a byline, that is the person who is answerable for it, whatever tools they used along the way.

We say this plainly because you would reasonably want to know, and because finding it out later would be worse than being told now.

Where the facts come from

Reporting routes, agency names, phone numbers and web addresses come from the organisation’s own published pages, and we link to the page rather than only quoting a number, because pages outlive phone numbers. Where we describe how a scam works, we are describing what people have told us and what the relevant agencies have published, not an investigation of our own.

Agencies rename themselves and numbers change, and we have no way to promise you that every link here is live today. The help directory is checked automatically each week and anything broken is flagged for a person. The rest gets checked when we touch it. If you find something dead, telling us is genuinely the fastest route to it being fixed.

We do not verify the accounts people send us. They are first-hand experiences, published as such, and the moderation policy sets out exactly what we remove, edit and leave alone.

Bylines and checked dates

Where a guide carries a byline and a checked date, that is the person answerable for it and the day they last read it through. Where it carries neither, nobody has signed it yet, and you should read it as a useful page rather than a reviewed one.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us at hello@shieldmate.io. We would much rather hear it than not. We will not pretend to a turnaround time we cannot guarantee: this is a small site, and a wrong phone number gets fixed the day we hear about it, while an argument about framing may take longer. If we disagree with you we will say so rather than go quiet.

Who pays for this, and what we want from you

ShieldMate is a project of Spell Shield Pty Ltd, a cyber security company in South Australia, and Spell Shield pays for it. There are no ads, no paywall, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links anywhere on the site.

We will never sell you anything, and we never pass your details to anyone. Nothing you read here is a route into a sales conversation, and nothing you tell us becomes a lead. If that ever changes, this page changes first.

What we are not

We are not an emergency service, a law enforcement agency, a crisis line, or a substitute for legal or financial advice. We do not investigate, we do not recover money, and we do not contact anybody on your behalf. What we do is tell you what to do next, show you that other people have been through the same thing, and point you to the organisations whose job this actually is.