Do not contaminate the evidence

The one idea

From the moment fraud happens, you are building a case that lives or dies on one asset: your credibility. Evidence contamination — confident guesses, convenient omissions, edited screenshots, deleted embarrassments — destroys that asset from the inside. The cruel arithmetic: one disproven claim licenses the bank to doubt ten true ones.

Compare:

Victim is sure they never clicked anything, and says so in the sworn statement. Bank produces the click log. Every other claim in the file — all true — is now read with suspicion.

versus

"I now recall I did click a link in an SMS that afternoon. I am including this because I want the record accurate." The clicking is one fact among many; the honesty is what the adjudicator remembers.

The four contaminations

1. Filling gaps with guesses. "It must have been about 15:00" becomes a fact once written. Label it: "approx, unverified".
2. Hiding your own mistakes. You shared the OTP, clicked the link, ignored an alert. The bank's records will surface it anyway — the only question is whether you disclosed it first (credibility preserved) or got caught omitting it (case over).
3. Editing evidence. Never alter originals. Annotate copies, clearly marked as copies.
4. Performing certainty. "Definitely", "never", "always" are traps under questioning. "To the best of my recollection" is not weakness; it is how credible people talk.

Try it now

Audit yourself: write down the two facts in your own story you feel LEAST sure about, and rewrite each with an honest label ("approx", "unverified", "I do not recall exactly"). Then write the one fact you would prefer to leave out — that one goes in the file first.

Your win today

Your file contains labelled uncertainty and disclosed mistakes — which is exactly what makes everything else in it believable.