Think it's a scam? Uncover who's behind it.

Most online fraud does not rely on technical skill. It relies on a name that sounds real, a story that fits the moment, and a reason to act before you have thought it through.

Which means the defence is not technical either. It is checking whether the person behind the offer exists.

Recordwell works from a full name. Ask for one, and pay attention to what happens next.

A legitimate seller, contractor, landlord or recruiter gives a name without drama. A script does not, because the name is the part that does not survive checking.

When you have a name, you are looking for depth: an age that fits, places lived, a business that was actually registered, a history that stretches back further than this month.

Fabricated identities are shallow by construction. Building a decade of record is expensive and slow, which is why almost nobody bothers.

A thin result is not proof on its own — young people and recent arrivals return little too — but a thin result attached to someone claiming twenty years in business is a contradiction.

The scripts are worth knowing individually, because each has a tell that appears early.

Marketplace sales. The item is priced below what it should be, the seller cannot meet, and payment must go by a method that cannot be reversed.

The tell is the payment route. A request for a gift card, a wire, a cryptocurrency transfer or a "friends and family" payment is the whole scam in one line.

Rental listings. Photographs of a real property, a price below the local market, and a landlord who is abroad and cannot show you the flat.

The tell is the deposit before viewing. Nobody legitimate needs money before you have stood in the room.

Job offers. An unsolicited approach, a salary above the role, an interview conducted entirely by text, and an immediate hire.

The tell arrives at onboarding: a cheque to deposit and forward, equipment you must buy yourself, or bank details requested before any paperwork exists.

Investment and cryptocurrency. A contact that begins socially, a platform that shows steady gains, and small withdrawals that work perfectly at first.

The tell is the withdrawal that fails at scale, followed by a tax or fee that must be paid before the balance can be released. That balance does not exist.

Technical support. A call or a pop-up about a problem you had not noticed, and a request to install remote-access software.

The tell is the direction of contact. A company that genuinely has a problem with your account does not phone you to ask for access.

Impersonation of an authority. A message claiming to come from a tax office, a court, a delivery service or a bank, with a deadline and a consequence.

The tell is the payment method again. No government agency asks for gift cards, and none of them settle a matter by text message.

Across all of them the same three levers appear, and recognising them is more useful than memorising the scripts.

Urgency, so there is no time to check. Isolation, so there is nobody to ask. And a payment route with no way back.

Any one of the three deserves a pause. All three together is not a warning sign; it is the answer.

Before money moves, a few minutes of checking is worth more than any instinct.

Search the name and see whether a real person or business stands behind it.

If a company is named, look it up in the state or national business register. Registration is free to check and hard to fake.

Look at the age of everything. A brand-new account presenting itself as an established operation is the most consistent signal there is.

Ask for something only a real party could supply: a business number, an address you can look up, or a short video call at a time you choose.

Insist on a payment method with recourse. A card payment can be disputed; a wire, a gift card and a crypto transfer generally cannot.

Call any organisation back on a number you found yourself, never the one you were given.

If money has already gone, the next hour matters more than anything else.

Call your bank or card issuer immediately and say the word fraud. Recent transfers are sometimes recallable, and the window is short.

If you paid by card, ask about a chargeback. If you paid a cryptocurrency address, record the address and the transaction identifier before doing anything else.

Save everything before you delete or block: the profile, the listing, the full message history, receipts, and every account name and number used.

Report it. In the United States that means reportfraud.ftc.gov and the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov; elsewhere, the national fraud reporting body.

Report the account to the platform as well. Platforms act on volume, and your report may be what connects a set of cases that each looked isolated.

Then change the passwords on anything you reused, and treat any account whose details you shared as compromised.

Expect a follow-up approach. Lists of people who have already lost money are traded, and the second script is a recovery service that will retrieve your funds for a fee.

No legitimate recovery service asks for money up front. That call is the same people, or their neighbours.

Finally, the part that is hardest to say and matters most: being deceived by a professional script is not a lapse of judgement.

These are full-time operations with tested material, and shame is the mechanism that keeps victims quiet and the numbers low. Reporting it is the useful response.

If the approach came through a dating app or a long online friendship, the catfish check page covers that version specifically.

If it came from a seller or a supplier, see verify an online seller; for a company rather than a person, see verify a business contact.