Hypervigilance and Threat Perception Self-Assessment for Scam Victims
Staying on Alert · 20 Questions across 5 Areas
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Keep your own copy
When you finish, you can save, email, or print your results on your own device — to keep, or to share with your therapist or mental health professional.
The SCARS Institute provides this tool to help you notice patterns of hypervigilance and threat sensitivity following a scam, and to decide whether extra support would help. You can save it to share the results with your therapist or mental health professional.
About This Assessment
This self-assessment helps you notice how much your body and mind are staying on alert after a scam, and how often ordinary situations feel threatening. Being scammed is a genuine breach of your safety and trust, and it is natural for the nervous system to respond by staying ready for danger. Some of that vigilance is protective. This tool is here to help you see when it has become constant enough to tire you, disturb your rest, or interfere with daily life.
The questions follow the way trauma researchers describe heightened arousal and threat sensitivity, across five areas: scanning and staying alert, startle and bodily tension, expecting and perceiving threat, sleep and rest, and the effect on focus and daily life. It is informed by the arousal and sense-of-threat features described in trauma frameworks such as the DSM-5-TR hyperarousal cluster and the ICD-11 International Trauma Questionnaire. The items are original and adapted for scam recovery, and this is not a copy of any clinical instrument.
Reflect on the past month as you answer each statement. A pattern across areas matters more than any single answer.
- 1 Strongly Disagree
- 2 Disagree
- 3 Neutral
- 4 Agree
- 5 Strongly Agree
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Your Result
By area
A word to hold onto
Being scammed is a real threat to your safety and trust, and a body that answers it by staying alert is doing what it evolved to do. Heightened vigilance is not a character flaw, and it is not the same as being unable to cope. This tool cannot diagnose anything. It is a mirror to help you see a pattern. When alertness stops protecting you and starts exhausting you, disturbing your sleep, or shrinking your life, that is a good reason to talk with a professional who understands trauma. A nervous system can learn safety again, and that is a real part of recovery.
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Hypervigilance and Threat Perception Self-Assessment | Educational use only. Not a clinical diagnosis. | www.ScamPsychology.org
