public

Assess whether a court-payment demand matches known NC court-scam patterns

Answers "is this court-payment demand a scam?" for a contact someone received — a missed-jury-duty penalty, unpaid court costs, a warrant, a bond. THE ASSESSMENT IS DETERMINISTIC: a fixed rule set plus NC Judicial Branch facts, not a model judgement, and it is the same code path the public /court-scam-check page uses. SEVERITY 0 DOES NOT MEAN LEGITIMATE — it means none of the patterns checked for were present in what was described, and callers must report it in those terms; a false all-clear is how someone ends up sending money. Hard facts escalate to 2: a payment method NC courts never accept, a jury-duty demand above the $50 statutory penalty, or a cold contact (call/text/email) that also carries a payment demand or arrest threat. A cold channel alone or a single behavioural flag caps at 1. If case_or_citation_number is supplied, caseLookup.status returns pending — the court-record lookup is deliberately NOT blocking (a cold portal solve is 20-45s); fetch it separately from /api/case-lookup-public. A case that does not exist is strong evidence of a scam; a case that DOES exist does not make the payment demand legitimate. Turnstile-protected: send turnstileToken, or the trusted-caller X-Internal-Secret header. Rate limited per IP. Every field is optional — a partial description still gets an assessment. NC only. Informational, not legal advice.

post/api/court-scam-check

Request

  • Base URL: https://app.courtdelta.com
  • URL: https://app.courtdelta.com/api/court-scam-check
  • Auth: none required

Request body

claim_type'jury_duty_penalty' | 'court_costs_or_fine' | 'bail_or_bond' | 'warrant_or_arrest' | 'missed_court_date' | 'other'

What the contact claimed the money was for.

contact_channel'phone_call' | 'text_sms' | 'email' | 'mail' | 'in_person'

How they made contact. Cold channels (call/text/email) weigh heavier.

amount_demandednumber

USD. For a jury-duty claim, anything above the $50 statutory penalty is a hard scam signal.

payment_method_requested'gift_card' | 'cryptocurrency' | 'virtual_currency_kiosk_atm' | 'wire_transfer_caller_directed' | 'peer_to_peer_app' | 'phone_requested_money_transfer' | 'mailed_check_to_clerk' | 'in_person_at_courthouse' | 'not_asked'

NC courts never take gift cards, crypto, kiosks, caller-directed wires or P2P apps.

behavioral_flagsstring[]
raw_descriptionstring

Anything else they were told, in their own words. Used for the assessment and to derive category tags; the text itself is not stored.

countystring

NC county named in the contact, if any.

case_or_citation_numberstring

If they cited one. Returns caseLookup.status=pending; look the record up separately.

turnstileTokenstring

Cloudflare Turnstile token. Not required when sending the trusted-caller X-Internal-Secret header.

Response

Assessment

severity0 | 1 | 2

2 LIKELY SCAM · 1 USE CAUTION · 0 none of the checked patterns appeared (NOT a finding of legitimacy).

factsstring[]

What NC courts actually do.

reportingobject

Where to report, incl. the FBI IC3 route if money was already sent.

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.