Most of the reports we receive describe someone who did check, but checked the wrong things, or checked after paying. The sequence below is ordered by effort: the cheapest and most informative checks come first, so that in most cases you never need the later ones.

None of it requires paying anybody, including us.

1. Search the exact details, in quotes

Put the phone number, the email address, the account name and the profile handle into a search engine, one at a time, in quotation marks. Add the word scam to a second search of each.

This finds people who have already written about the same details on forums, Facebook groups and complaint sites. It costs a minute and it resolves a surprising proportion of cases outright.

2. Reverse image search the photographs

Save the profile picture and any photographs of goods, then upload them to Google Images or TinEye. You are looking for the same image appearing elsewhere, under a different name, earlier.

Be careful with the conclusion. A photograph appearing elsewhere may mean the identity is borrowed. It may also mean a stock photograph was used for an ordinary reason. What matters is whether the person appears elsewhere under another name.

3. Look at the account's history, not its age

Accounts are bought, sold and repurposed, so a creation date proves little on its own. Look instead at whether the activity is continuous: posts, photographs, comments from other people, and a social graph that predates the moment they contacted you. An account with a long registration history and no life in it before last month is worth noticing.

4. Check the business, if there is one

• SEC — registered corporations and partnerships. The SEC also publishes advisories naming entities soliciting investment without a licence, and those are worth searching directly.
• DTI — registered business names for sole proprietors.
• Department of Migrant Workers — licensed recruitment agencies for overseas employment. Check the licence status, not just whether the name appears.
• BSP — banks, e-money issuers and other supervised financial institutions.

Verifying that a company exists is not the same as verifying that the person contacting you represents it. Real firms are impersonated routinely. Where it matters, telephone the company on a number you found yourself.

5. Insist on live video, early

For anything involving a person rather than a shop, a short video call settles more than every other check combined. Ask early, while it is still an ordinary thing to suggest, and ask them to do something simple and unrehearsed during it.

A single refusal means nothing. A reason that persists for weeks, against a backdrop of daily contact, is among the most informative signals there is.

6. Search our register

We hold reports sent to us by the public: names, numbers, email addresses and handles that people have reported. Searching is free.

7. Think about the payment method before the payment

How you pay determines what can be done afterwards, and it is the part people consider last:

• Bank transfer, e-wallet transfer and remittance to a named individual are effectively final. Speed of reporting is the only real lever.
• Payment inside a marketplace's own system keeps a dispute process available.
• Cash on collection, in a public place, for local purchases, removes the problem.
• Cryptocurrency has no reversal mechanism of any kind. A request to pay this way for an ordinary transaction is itself worth weighing.

The one question underneath all of it

Every check above is a way of asking the same thing: if this person is not who they say they are, what could I do about it tomorrow?

If the honest answer is nothing — an unverifiable account, an irreversible transfer, no address, no company, no third party who knows — then the amount at stake is the amount you are prepared to lose, however convincing the story is. That judgement is easy to make beforehand and impossible to make afterwards, which is the whole reason for doing it first.