Suspicious platform check

What this check actually does

It takes nine signals that recur across documented fraud structures, weights them by how strongly each one distinguishes fraud from ordinary business, and reports which are present. It does not look up the platform, contact anyone, or send your answers anywhere — the whole thing runs in the page you are reading.

Why it will not tell you "this is a scam"

Because it cannot know, and because a tool that produced that output would be wrong sometimes in a way that matters. Legitimate businesses occasionally trip one or two of these signals through clumsy marketing. Naming a specific company as fraudulent on the basis of nine checkboxes would be irresponsible, and we would be doing it from a position of no knowledge about the company at all.

What the tool can honestly do is tell you which patterns are present and what each one has meant historically. The judgement stays with you, which is where it belongs.

Why four signals are weighted heavier

A promised return, paid recruitment, money leaving official channels, and a payment demanded before withdrawal are not merely suspicious — they are the defining mechanics of pyramid schemes, Ponzi structures and advance-fee fraud. Ordinary businesses do not need any of them. The other five are softer: each has innocent explanations, and they matter mainly in combination.

The two checks worth more than this questionnaire

First, the public register. Take the legal entity name from the terms of service — not the brand — and search your national financial regulator's register, then its warning list. A convincing website cannot fake an entry in a regulator's database. Second, a small test withdrawal. Money that comes back out is the only evidence that is not a claim.

Who this is for

People who have been pointed at a platform they had not heard of, usually by someone. If you are evaluating a large, well-known exchange instead, this tool will return almost nothing useful, and the risks that matter there are different in kind — solvency, custody and account freezes rather than fraud structures. Those are covered in the platform failure file.

If money is already in

The advice changes. Stop sending anything further, particularly any fee described as necessary to release your balance, preserve everything in writing, and work through the after-the-fact checklist rather than continuing to negotiate. The single most common way people lose a second time is by paying to recover the first loss.