Verify a freelancer before you pay.

Short answer. Verify that the person exists as described, that the work history is theirs, and that the money is structured so a bad hire costs you one milestone rather than the whole project.

Most freelance disappointments are not fraud. They are a mismatch nobody checked for. The checks below separate the two.

The identity questions worth asking

Does the person have a history that predates this engagement?

Accounts created this quarter, a portfolio with no client names, and a profile photograph that appears elsewhere under another name are the three signals that matter most.

Reverse-image the profile picture. A reused photograph settles the question immediately; a clean result proves nothing, because an original photo simply may not be indexed.

Ask for one piece of work in progress rather than a finished portfolio — a draft, a branch, a working file. Borrowed portfolios rarely come with process.

Checking the work, not the claims

For developers, the repository history is the strongest evidence available: commit dates spread over years, issues and reviews with other humans, code in the language they claim.

A profile created last month with a burst of commits on the same day is not a history.

For designers and writers, ask where a specific piece was published and confirm it at the publication rather than in the portfolio.

For regulated work — engineering, accounting, legal, medical — the state licence board is public, free and authoritative, and it also publishes discipline.

References are worth one call each, and the useful question is not "were they good" but "what did you have to do yourselves".

Where public records help

A real person has a record footprint: an address history, business registrations if they invoice as a company, court filings, published mentions.

A name search shows the people who share the name; what is anchored to the one you pick is the part that means something.

Look for coherence between the name on the contract, the name on the invoice and the name on the bank account. Divergence there is where disputes start.

Recordwell holds no phone or email data, so an address or a handle cannot be turned into a person here — the input that works is a full name.

Structure the money so the risk is bounded

Milestones, not a lump sum. Each milestone should be small enough that losing it is annoying rather than serious.

Never pay the full amount before any deliverable exists, and never pay outside the platform that holds the escrow you are relying on.

If a freelancer asks to move off-platform to avoid fees, understand what you are giving up: the dispute process, the payment record, and the identity verification the platform did.

Pay by a method with a dispute path. Wires, crypto and gift cards have none — and a request for those, from a stranger, is the end of the conversation.

The contract points that actually get argued

Who owns the work product, and from what moment. Without an assignment in writing, the default is often not what a client assumes.

What "done" means, in terms both sides can point at.

What happens to access when the engagement ends: repositories, drives, admin accounts, API keys.

And whether subcontracting is allowed. A freelancer quietly passing the work on is the most common cause of a quality collapse mid-project.

Access is the risk people underestimate

A contractor with production access, a shared admin account or a company card is an insider, whatever the contract calls them.

Give the narrowest access that makes the work possible, on named accounts rather than shared ones, and set an end date when you set it up.

Remove access on the last day, not when someone remembers. Most access that leaks was never revoked.

What you may not do with a public-records check

You may not use it to decide whether to hire someone in the FCRA sense.

Employment screening — including of contractors, in many cases — requires a consumer reporting agency, written consent and an adverse-action process. Recordwell is not one, and its results may not be used that way.

What public-record research is for is the pre-contract question: does this person exist as described, and does the story hold together.

Signals that should stop the engagement

A refusal to take a short video call, on a project that will involve months of collaboration.

An identity that changes mid-conversation: a different legal name on the invoice, a bank account in a third party's name, a company that does not exist where it claims to.

Pressure to pay ahead of schedule, especially framed as a personal emergency.

And a portfolio that cannot survive one question about how a piece was made.

If it has already gone wrong

Stop paying, and put the dispute in the platform's process before it goes anywhere else — that record is what any later claim rests on.

Collect the contract, the brief, the deliverables and the payment history in one place while the account still exists.

For a loss involving a transfer, report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and, where a wire or crypto is involved, ic3.gov.

Then revoke every access the engagement created, including the ones you forgot you granted.

For a company rather than an individual, vendor due diligence covers the registers that apply to an entity.