Paranoia Self-Assessment for Scam Victims
Suspicion and Mistrust · 20 Questions across 5 Areas
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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 suspicion and mistrust 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 suspicion, mistrust, and watchfulness you are carrying after a scam, and whether it may be affecting your recovery. Being scammed is a real betrayal, and some increased caution afterward is healthy and protective, especially since survivors are sometimes targeted again. This tool is here to help you see when watchfulness has grown large enough to cause you distress or to interfere with rebuilding your life.
The questions follow a well-established model of how suspicious thinking is structured, moving from common, milder experiences to rarer, more intense ones across five areas: feeling exposed around others, difficulty trusting, staying on guard, reading meaning into ordinary events, and feeling deliberately targeted. It is informed by research on the structure of paranoia in the general population and by validated measures such as the Revised Green et al. Paranoid Thoughts Scale. 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 betrayal, and it is natural for the mind to answer it by becoming more guarded. Increased caution is not a character flaw, and it is not the same as clinical paranoia. This tool cannot diagnose anything. It is a mirror to help you see a pattern. When watchfulness starts to cause you distress, strain your relationships, or keep you from rebuilding an ordinary life, that is a good reason to talk with a professional who understands trauma. Learning to trust again, carefully and on your own terms, is part of recovery, and it is possible.
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Paranoia Self-Assessment | Educational use only. Not a clinical diagnosis. | www.ScamPsychology.org
