Someone called offering me a loan. Is it a scam?

Start with one rule, because it settles most of these calls on its own: it is illegal for a telemarketer to promise you a loan and ask you to pay for it before you get it. That's the Federal Trade Commission's language, not a rule of thumb. If the person on the phone wants money up front to release your loan, you have your answer and you can hang up.

Everything below is the longer version — the other signs, how to check a lender who might be real, and what to do if money has already left.

The three signs the FTC names

1. Approval guaranteed, credit doesn't matter

“Bad credit? No problem.” “No hassle — guaranteed.” Real lenders cannot promise credit before they have looked at your situation, because sometimes the answer is no. A guarantee offered before any review isn't confidence, it's the pitch.

2. A fee before the money arrives

You're told you're approved, then told there's a payment to make first — for insurance, processing, paperwork, or a “good faith deposit.” This is the mechanism of the entire scam. There is no loan; the fee is the product.

Legitimate lenders do charge origination fees. The difference is where they come from: a real fee is deducted from the loan proceeds or settled at closing, and it appears on the disclosure you sign. It does not arrive as a request to send money to a stranger in advance.

3. They called you

An unsolicited call offering credit, combined with either of the above, is the pattern the rule was written for. The FTC's advice on robocalls is simply to hang up — and to report the number rather than pressing anything to opt out.

Two more that aren't on the list but should be

• Pressure to decide right now. Urgency exists to stop you checking. A real loan will still be there tomorrow, and any lender who says otherwise has told you something useful about themselves.
• Refusal to put the terms in writing. The APR and the total of payments must be disclosed in writing before you sign. A lender who won't send them is either not a lender or not one you want.

How to check a lender who might be real

1. Check registration with your state. Your state attorney general or financial regulator can tell you whether a lender is registered to do business there. Many scam operations aren't registered anywhere.
2. Search the name with “complaint” or “scam”. A company that has been running this for a while usually has a trail.
3. Call back on a number you found yourself. Not the one they gave you, and not the one in the caller ID — both are trivial to fake. Look up the company independently and call that.
4. Ask for the APR and the total of payments in writing. The request itself is diagnostic. A real lender emails them over; a scammer suddenly needs you to act before the offer expires.

If you already paid

Move quickly, and don't spend time on embarrassment — these operations are practiced, and being taken in says nothing about you.

• Report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. It feeds the enforcement actions that eventually shut these down.
• Contact whoever moved the money immediately — your bank, the wire service, the gift card issuer, the crypto exchange. A small number of transfers can still be stopped if you catch them fast.
• Expect the follow-up call. People who have paid once get contacted again, sometimes by someone offering to recover the lost money for a fee. That is the same scam wearing a different hat.

A real offer can still be a bad one

Passing every check above only means the lender exists. It says nothing about whether the loan is any good — and the ones that are legal but expensive are far more common than the ones that are outright fake.

So once you know it's real, ask the second question: what is this actually costing? Enter the amount and the payment they quoted and see what rate each possible term implies.

If the implied rate lands in the twenties or thirties, nobody has broken a law — but you are being charged a great deal for not shopping. A credit union quote takes an afternoon and is the single highest-value phone call in this whole process. There's more on reading an offer in what a quoted payment actually means.

Sources

The rule and the three warning signs come from the FTC's consumer guidance, What To Know About Advance-Fee Loans. Report fraud at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.