You paid for something that never came, or you just realized the "store," the crypto site, the job listing, or the rental was fake. The website that took your money can be gone by tomorrow — scam operators take pages down fast, and once a page is offline, no tool can recover what you didn't save. So before anything else: capture it now. Get a copy in hand, then read the rest of this.
Scams are not a rare problem to build a paper trail for. The Federal Trade Commission reported that people told it they lost about $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025 — the highest on record — and imposter scams alone accounted for $3.5 billion of that. Whether you're headed to small claims, disputing a card charge, or just filing a report so investigators can connect the dots, the same rule applies: the evidence is only as good as the copy you made while the site was still live.
A tight crop of a price or a promise is the easiest thing in the world to attack, because it strips away everything that ties the page to a real site at a real moment. Capture the full view: the complete URL in the address bar, the page's own headings and text, any order confirmation, checkout page, or "contact us" details, and the date and time. If you have a receipt email, a payment confirmation, or a chat with the "seller," save those too — but the live page is the piece most likely to vanish, so start there.
To be used as evidence, a capture has to be authenticated — under Federal Rule of Evidence 901(a), whoever offers it must produce "evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is." (Most states follow the same standard; check your local rule.) For a webpage, the usual route is testimony from the person who captured it (Rule 901(b)(1)), backed by distinctive details on the page itself — the URL, the branding, the specific text (Rule 901(b)(4)). The more your copy shows about where it came from and that it hasn't been altered, the harder it is to dismiss as something you typed up yourself.
Record, while it's fresh: the exact URL, the date and time you captured it (note your time zone), the device and browser you used, how you found the site, and what happened (what you paid, how, and what you expected). A contemporaneous note is far more persuasive months later than a hazy recollection, and it's exactly the kind of first-hand account Rule 901(b)(1) contemplates. Keep your payment records — card statement, transfer confirmation, receipt — with the capture.
Save the original capture and don't touch it: no cropping, no annotations, no re-saving through a photo editor. If you need to mark it up, work on a copy and keep the untouched original.
In plain terms: if your capture has a cryptographic hash (such as SHA-256) recorded at the moment you made it, anyone can later recompute that hash and confirm the file hasn't changed since. It doesn't guarantee admission, but it directly answers the objection digital evidence draws most — "how do we know this wasn't doctored?"
Reporting a scam helps investigators and can matter for a card dispute or refund, but the agencies generally don't hand you back a court-ready copy of the page, so make your own first. Then report: the FTC takes consumer fraud reports at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center takes online-crime complaints at ic3.gov. If you paid by card or bank, notify your bank promptly — many chargeback and error-resolution rights are time-limited. Keep the confirmation number from every report with your evidence file.
Scam sites are built to disappear — domains get abandoned, hosts pull them, and the whole thing can be dark within days. Two backups beat one. The Wayback Machine can snapshot many public pages on demand and the Internet Archive offers an affidavit service for authenticating its records in litigation — but it only captures what it can reach, and it may not have crawled the exact page you need. Your own timestamped copy, made while the site was up, is what protects you if nothing else survives.
Honesty matters more than sales copy here: no capture tool, ours included, can guarantee a court will admit your evidence, and none can get your money back on its own. Admissibility is decided by the judge under your jurisdiction's rules, and authentication is only one hurdle — hearsay, relevance, and completeness objections exist too. A webpage tool can only reach public pages; content behind a login, a payment app's private transaction screen, or a text thread has to be captured on the device itself (screen-record or photograph it, and keep the device). For a large loss or anything heading to real litigation, talk to a lawyer about formal forensic collection. For small claims, a card dispute, or a police or agency report, a well-documented, hashed capture still beats a bare screenshot every time.
This is general information, not legal advice, and admissibility is always decided by the court under the rules of your jurisdiction. ProofSnap preserves public webpages with a timestamp and integrity hash; it does not and cannot guarantee that any capture will be admitted as evidence, and it cannot access private or login-gated content. Sources: Fed. R. Evid. 901 and Fed. R. Evid. 902(13)–(14) (Cornell LII); FTC, "FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025" (June 2026); FTC ReportFraud; FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3); Internet Archive legal/affidavit information.