Verifying Identity Claims

Most claims are public records

An employer, a professional registration, a company, a licence to handle money. These are not private facts, and almost all of them sit in a register somebody maintains precisely so that strangers can check.

That is the good news about the categories of fraud that borrow authority: the claim they lean on is usually the easiest one to test.

Where to look

Companies appear in a national register — Companies House in the UK, the KvK in the Netherlands, a state's Secretary of State in the US. Age, address and directors are public. A company incorporated eleven weeks ago is not a crime, but it is a fact worth having.

Regulated finance is the important one. Anybody handling investments is either on a regulator's register or is committing an offence by claiming to be. Every European regulator publishes both a register of the authorised and, more useful, a list of firms it has warned about. Check the warning list first: it is shorter and it is where the answer usually is.

Professionals — doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers — have registers held by their own bodies.

The two rules that make it work

Search the register, never the link. A convincing screenshot of a licence proves nothing, and forged regulator documents, complete with logos and reference numbers, are a documented and common feature of investment fraud. Type the regulator's address in yourself.

Search the name, not the number. Given a firm name and a registration number, look up the number and check whether the *name* attached to it matches. Cloned-firm fraud works by giving you a genuine registration belonging to somebody else, and it survives every check except that one.

When it comes back clean

You have verified that a company or a licence exists. You have not verified that the person messaging you has anything to do with it — which is why this check ends where the independent channel begins: find the switchboard number yourself and ask for them by name.