Scam Map

Inspiration

A while back, I had a friend that was scammed while travelling in Hungary and with Covid restrictions lifted, there have been more and more people travelling. The increase of travellers have drastically increased the number of people susceptible to scams. In fact, according to ftc.gov (Federal Trade Commission), "Reported fraud losses increase more than 70 percent over 2020 to more than $5.8 billion". Thus, this project, though small, was born.

What it does

Scam map is a user input and user integrity based map. The site allows user to self report scams they have heard about or been scammed of. Basically, the site has a map that shows all the points of where people have been scammed. To add more points, all you have to fill out a form and it will be immediately updated

How we built it

Using flask as a web framework, I used javascript and html. To make the map itself, I used leaflet.js as it allowed me to make it interactive and update it anytime any new data came in. For the the form, I used the tag

and passed it through to the flask-python code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am extremely proud of the fact that it actually works. While ugly and not attention catching, I believe it does have the potential to become something greater.

What we learned and challenges we ran into

Going into this project, I did not know just how much I needed to learn and overcome. The first challenge I came across was my approach. I tried 3 different approaches before landing on my final one as well as many many python libraries(even after settling on the final one, the experiments and testing learning did not end). The approaches were djanjo, just javascript, html, and css; just python, google maps api(this was a very possible idea its just I dont have money :,) ); all of which, failed. While learning django, I realized it was too complicated to make on repl from scratch and the repl template did not work for me. While using just html, javascript, and css, I realized if I wanted to make this project on time, I could not use javascript as it was a language I had never used before. Eventually, I settled on flask because it was similar to django (as previously explored). As for the learning javascript problem, flask was a big help because it did the hardest parts of this project. After that wall, the project went fairly well with just a few issues that stemmed from my unfamiliarity with javascript.

What's next for Scam Map

In the future, I am hoping to expand Scam maps range. With a little more time and learn, it may be possible to track down past data for a wider range, add categories (that separated so you can filter and look for specific things like targeted towards elderly or just scams in Canada), pretty up the site, turn it into an actual app, create login pages and accounts to improve security, and make a more user friendly interface.