Is It A Scam?

You Will Never Know Unless You Verify

Here is a tool to help you reasonably verify strangers online.

Why This Checklist Matters

Most online scams begin with a stranger. The first message looks harmless: a friendly hello, a wrong-number text, a job offer, an investment tip, or an urgent call from someone claiming to be your bank. Criminals send these openings by the thousands and work every reply. By the time money comes up, the stranger already feels like a friend, a partner, or a trusted official, and checking feels rude or unnecessary. That is exactly how scams succeed.

Research shows that people judge whether someone is lying only slightly better than a coin toss, about 54 percent of the time. Police officers and other experts do no better. Your instincts are not broken; human beings simply cannot see honesty in a profile, a message, or a voice. This checklist replaces that guesswork with something that works: checking facts through sources the other person does not control.

Use It With Every Stranger

Use this checklist with every person, company, or organization that contacts you first, or that you meet online and have never met face to face. Do not wait until something feels wrong. Scams feel right by design, and the warning signs arrive after trust has already formed. Checking early, while you have nothing invested, is easy and costs you nothing.

You do not need this checklist for people you already know in real life, such as family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. The one exception is a message from a known person that arrives from a new number or account, asks for money, or asks for secrecy. Criminals take over and copy real accounts, so treat that message as coming from a stranger until you confirm it by calling the person at a number you already have.

Using this checklist is not an accusation. A genuine person passes these checks without difficulty and has no reason to object. A person who becomes angry, hurt, or insulted when you verify their identity has shown you something important.

When the Results Are Unclear

Many checks will come back without a clear answer. A photo search finds nothing, a story has no obvious contradictions, and no money has come up yet. That is not proof that the person is real. A clean result means only that you found no evidence either way, and skilled criminals often look clean in the early weeks.

Follow these rules when you cannot tell.

Treat unverified as unverified. Trust grows from confirmed facts, not from the absence of red flags. Until independent sources confirm who someone is, treat them as unverified, however kind and consistent they seem.

Keep the burden on the stranger. You do not need to prove someone is fake. They need to give you facts you can confirm on your own. If they cannot or will not, the question stays open.

Protect yourself while the question is open. Send no money, gifts, or cryptocurrency. Share no passwords, codes, account details, identity documents, or private photos, and move no money for anyone. Nothing you lose this way can be undone, and a real person will wait.

Let time do some of the work. Genuine people and genuine opportunities survive a pause. Scams depend on urgency. When pressure grows as you slow down, the pressure is your answer.

Count the pattern, not single signs. One warning sign has an innocent explanation. Three or four together form the shape of a scam, even when each one seems small.

Ask someone outside the relationship. A trusted friend, your bank, or a victim-support organization sees what the relationship hides from you. If you feel reluctant to show them, that reluctance is itself a warning sign.

A contact counts as verified only when independent sources confirm the identity and the claims, and nothing you found contradicts them. If any check failed, treat the contact as a probable scam and stop. If the results stay unclear, keep protecting yourself and keep checking. Choose your conclusion at the end of the checklist below, and return to it whenever new information appears.

Verification Checklist