Methodology
Nothing up our sleeve
This page is the complete scoring rubric for every screener on this site — each item, its weight, its source, and exactly how answers become a result. If a future screener can't publish a section like these, it doesn't ship.
How scoring works
Every screener uses the same engine. Each item is answered yes (full weight), not sure (half weight), or no (zero). The weighted sum places the result in a band — but money items also carry hard floor rules, mirroring the FTC's framing that a money ask is the defining signal rather than one flag among many: any single money item answered yes floors the result at Elevated; two or more money yeses, or a yes on an item marked critical, moves it to High regardless of the total. The point thresholds differ per instrument and are listed with each one below.
Screener 01 — Am I dating a bot?
A 16-item checklist for romance-scam and AI-persona risk factors, in three sections: how they talk (conversation tells), the story they tell (narrative shape), and money (extraction behaviors). An evidence-derived checklist, not a validated psychometric scale — see limitations below.
Screener 02 — Am I dating a scammer?
A 12-item checklist for the documented shape of romance-scam extraction — the story, the pressure, and the money — written to be answerable on behalf of someone else, so a worried friend or family member can walk through it too. Same engine, same rules.
Screener 03 — Am I dating a narcissist?
A 12-item checklist reading the user's experience of a relationship against narcissistic patterns described in clinical consumer-health sources (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic) and the National Domestic Violence Hotline's emotional-abuse documentation. It has no money group, so scoring is pure thresholds — and its result copy states explicitly, at every band, that it describes a pattern the user is living with, never a diagnosis of another person. No reproduced scale items, no DSM text.
Screener 04 — Am I dating an avoidant partner?
A 10-item checklist of the deactivating strategies documented in the adult-attachment research literature (Fraley; Mikulincer & Shaver), written as original descriptions of observable partner behavior. Deliberately not the ECR-R or any published scale's items — the ECR-R is free only for non-commercial research use. The gentlest screener on the site: avoidance is framed throughout as a common, changeable pattern, not a verdict.
Limitations, stated plainly
- · This instrument has not been through a formal validation study. Items and weights come directly from published FTC/FBI documentation, but the thresholds are editorial judgment, not fitted parameters.
- · It is self-report about someone else's behavior, answered by the person with the least distance from the situation.
- · Risk factors are not proof. Real people are sometimes deployed overseas, bad at video calls, and fast to say "I love you". The score means "verify", never "convict".
- · A low score is not clearance. Patient scammers show few flags early — which is why the money rules floor the result regardless of the total.
Privacy
Scoring runs entirely in your browser. Answers are never transmitted, stored, or logged — there is no backend, no analytics script, and no account system on this site. We can't leak what we never had.