Why I Built ScanTotal

Published: 1 July 2026 • By Kumari Rajapaksha, Founder

A friend once told me about the hardest thing that had happened to her that year. She had become the victim of an online scam, and her family lost money they had saved carefully over many years. What stayed with me afterwards was not the amount. It was how ordinary the whole thing had been, and how easily the people behind it had manipulated someone into handing over savings that had taken most of a lifetime to build.

I remember being genuinely surprised. I had quietly assumed that falling for a scam took some kind of carelessness. It doesn't. These operations are designed, patiently and deliberately, to work on almost anyone on a bad day. That conversation is the reason ScanTotal exists.

Looking for a tool that wasn't there

My first instinct was practical. Surely there was already a simple, free way for an ordinary person to check whether a text message or a QR code was safe before acting on it. I started researching the SMS and QR scanning tools that were available, and I kept hitting the same wall. The capable tools were built for security teams and analysts, not for a worried parent or a busy student. The simple ones were rarely free, or they asked you to create an account and hand over your details just to use them.

That gap bothered me. The people most likely to be targeted, and least able to absorb the loss, were the people least served by the tools that already existed.

Deciding to build it

I am a business consultant and technology strategist by background, and I live in Melbourne. Most of my work is about helping organisations apply technology to real problems in a practical, cost-effective way. Looking at the scam problem, I recognised the same shape: a growing social and financial issue that a simple, accessible piece of technology could genuinely help with.

I talked the idea through with my partner, and we agreed to build something modest but real. A tool that would offer basic scanning at no cost and help people protect their money and their personal security, without needing any technical knowledge. We were not trying to build a security empire. We wanted the thing I couldn't find for my friend.

The two rules we set early

Two decisions shaped everything.

The first was that the core features had to stay free. Charging for a tool like this would quietly exclude exactly the people who need it most, and a protection that only reaches people who can afford a subscription isn't really solving the problem I set out to solve.

The second was privacy. A tool that checks your messages and files is only trustworthy if it isn't quietly collecting them. So we chose not to store personal information. Files are checked and never kept, there is no account to create, and there is nothing to track. You should be able to use ScanTotal precisely because you do not have to trust us with your data.

What ScanTotal does today

Today ScanTotal is a free, web-based scanner with six tools in one place: a URL checker, a file malware scanner, an email phishing analyser, an SMS scam analyser, a QR code scanner, and a threat intelligence lookup. You paste a link, upload a file, or drop in a suspicious message, and you get a clear answer in plain language. No jargon, no signup, no cost. It is deliberately simple, because if a security tool is too complicated for a regular person to use, it isn't doing its job.

What comes next

We intend to keep expanding the tool and adding new features for free over time. If there is enough demand, we may also offer more advanced capabilities for commercial users, which would help support the free service for everyone else.

But the goal has not changed since that first conversation. I want an ordinary person, on an ordinary day, to have somewhere simple and honest to check "is this safe?" before they act, so that fewer families have to go through what hers did.

Kumari Rajapaksha
Founder, ScanTotal
Melbourne, Australia