The Five-Minute Scam Check to Run on Any Opportunity

Check one: does the organization exist away from this message

Start with a blank search box and the name only. Not the link in the message, not the name plus the job title, not the name plus the word "review". Just the name.

You are looking for evidence that this organization existed before it contacted you, produced by somebody other than the organization. Customers talking about it. A local news mention. A supplier listing it. An entry in whatever public register of businesses your country keeps. An address in map data with a photograph of a building attached.

Three failure states end the check here. The name returns nothing outside the message. The name returns a completely different business. Or the name returns only material the organization published about itself, and nothing published by anybody else.

That last one is the interesting failure, because it is exactly what a site built last month looks like. Existence and legitimacy are separate questions and a website settles neither, which is worked through in what a professional-looking website does and does not prove.

Check two: does the contact route match the organization

Open its own site from your search results, never from the message. Find the contact page. Read the email domain it uses, the phone numbers it lists, and the platforms it says it recruits or sells through. Then hold the message next to it.

The strongest version of this check abandons the message entirely. Call the published number and ask about the offer as though the message never existed. If the organization and the offer are both real, you will be routed to it. If nobody there knows what you are talking about, the offer was not theirs.

Whether the individual who messaged you actually works there is a related check with its own steps: confirming a recruiter is who they claim to be.

Check three: is the offer on their own site

An organization hiring for a role puts the role on its own careers page. An organization selling a product puts the product on its own site with a price on it. That is not a courtesy, it is how they get applicants and buyers at all.

Four outcomes, in descending order of comfort. It is there with the same title and terms. It is there with different terms, which is a question to ask before anything else happens. It is not there at all. Or the site has no careers section, no product list and no prices anywhere.

A missing listing is not automatically fraud. Roles get filled, pages lag, small employers hire through agencies without ever posting. But it converts the offer from something to act on into something to ask about, through the published contact route from check two.

Check four: search the name next to neutral words

The words you pair with the name decide what comes back, and the ones people reach for first are the wrong ones.

Neutral pairings do more work:

That last one is the highest-value search on the list. Fraud runs at volume, and volume means the same paragraph has been sent to other people. Put a full sentence from the message inside quotation marks and search it. If it turns up on a forum or a complaints board with a different company name attached, you can stop. All of this runs in a plain browser with no account and nothing installed — free tools that cost nothing to set up covers the rest of that kit.

Check five: what does it ask you to do first

Look at the first action the offer requires, before any work has happened, and hold it against what checks one to four told you.

Others invert the direction the money should flow, or move the risk onto you:

What makes check five decisive is the combination. A first action from the second list, in an offer that already failed one of the first four checks, is where you stop and do not reply. The wider frame for classifying what you are looking at is the questions that separate a real side hustle from a scam, and the wording of the advert behind the offer is read closely in what a fake remote job listing looks like.

Running the checks after you have already engaged

They run identically backwards, and a failure means something more specific once you are in a conversation.

Do them in the same order. If check one fails now, with no independent trace of the organization, stop replying rather than asking them to explain, because an explanation is precisely what they are equipped to produce. If check two fails, the person you have been talking to is not reachable through the organization, and that is the finding regardless of how the conversation felt.

Then take inventory of what has left your hands. Documents, bank details, passwords, a payment, access to a device, a signature. Each has a different first call: your bank for money and account details, the organization being impersonated for anything sent in their name, and your consumer protection agency or state attorney general's office for the report.

What five clean checks still leave standing

These five checks remove the obvious. They certify nothing.

A registered company with a real address, a real site, a real careers page and a clean search history can still run a bad offer: underpay you, misclassify you, add a fee nobody mentioned, or sell a service that does nothing. Registration is a filing, not a character reference. And a well-resourced fraud can pass every check here, because everything on the list is buyable.

There is a failure in the other direction too. A real one-person business with no reviews, a new site, a mobile number and a generic email address will fail three of these and still pay you properly for a day's work. Applying the list as a score rather than as a sequence will cost you income.

So use them for what they do. Run them before you reply, in order, and stop at the first hard failure. Never send money, documents or account access ahead of the work, and never move money for somebody you have not met.