San Francisco's Treasurer and Tax Collector announced on July 7 that the city has built what it calls the first coordinated, city-led response to scams in the country, funded by a three-year, $3 million grant from JPMorganChase.
The program, StopScams SF, is run out of the Treasurer's Economic Justice Center. It combines free one-on-one financial counseling for scam victims, multilingual public alerts, and a "Payment Verification Directory" residents can use to confirm whether a city payment request is genuine before they pay it.
The initiative also funds social-media and 311 monitoring to track emerging scam trends as they spread across the city, alongside public education delivered in multiple languages. The Treasurer's office says it plans to package the approach into a "StopScams Playbook" other cities can adapt.
Most public fraud-prevention spending goes toward the warning: posters, alerts, seminars telling people what to watch for before something happens. Free financial counseling after a loss, plus a way to check a payment request's legitimacy, is a different kind of spending — aimed at what happens once a scam is already underway.
It's a concrete answer to a question that comes up often in this field: what happens once a referral is needed, and who is actually equipped to take it.
San Francisco's program is one city government's answer; whether it becomes a model other jurisdictions adopt, or stays a single well-funded exception, isn't yet settled. Larigent tracks developments like this one as part of its ongoing intelligence work.
If this is your family
If your family is dealing with a scam's aftermath, ask whether your city, county, or state runs a free financial-counseling service for victims — many do, even quietly. Before paying any government office electronically, verify its payment instructions independently rather than trusting a link or number a caller provides.
Sources
San Francisco Becomes First City in the Country to Build a Unified Response to Scams — San Francisco Office of the Treasurer & Tax Collector, July 7, 2026