Someone recommended crypto to you. Here is how to judge them

The awkward thing about this situation is that the person recommending it might be entirely sincere. Most people who talk their friends into crypto are not running anything — they are enthusiastic, they had a good experience, and they want to share it. That makes "is this person a scammer" the wrong question, because the answer is usually no and it still does not tell you whether to hand over money.

Better question: what would I need to know to decide, regardless of who is asking? Four checks, in the order that costs you least.

Check one: what do they get if you say yes?

Ask directly. It is not rude and the reaction is informative.

The possible answers form a scale. "I get a referral bonus" is fine — it is normal, it is how referral programmes work, and someone who says it plainly has told you the truth. "I earn a percentage of what you deposit, ongoing" is a different structure and you should want to know why. "I get a commission when you recruit others" is the defining feature of a pyramid, and at that point the conversation is over regardless of how much you like them.

The answer that matters most is a refusal to answer, or irritation at the question. Someone operating in good faith has no reason to be annoyed by it. We disclose our own arrangement on the disclosure page for the same reason — if you cannot say it out loud, that is worth noticing about yourself.

Check two: can you find the platform in a public register?

This takes two minutes and it is the check that a convincing website cannot survive.

Take the name of the platform — the legal entity, if you can find it in the terms of service — and search your national financial regulator's public register. In the UK that is the FCA register; in the EU, national authorities publish authorised crypto-asset service providers; in the US, your state regulator plus the relevant federal databases.

What you are looking for is not just presence. Also check the regulator's warning list, which most maintain — a list of firms they have flagged as operating without authorisation or as suspected clones. A name appearing there ends the discussion immediately.

If the platform is not in any register, that does not automatically make it fraudulent — plenty of legitimate businesses operate under regimes with no register. It does mean that if something goes wrong, there is no authority to complain to, and you should size your decision as though you are entirely on your own, because you are. The mechanics of this check are in the source verification checklist.

Check three: is there a clock on it?

Watch for the deadline. "The round closes Friday." "The bonus rate ends tonight." "I can hold your place for an hour."

Time pressure has exactly one function in a sales conversation, which is to prevent you from doing the thing that most reliably kills a bad offer: describing it to someone who is not in the room. That is why it is present in nearly every documented case and absent from ordinary financial decisions. A savings account does not expire at midnight.

The counter is a rule rather than a judgement: nothing with a deadline gets decided the same day. If it is real, tomorrow costs you a small amount of upside. If it is not, tomorrow saves you everything.

One refinement that saves time: run this check before you look at anything the platform has published about itself. Websites, whitepapers and audit documents are produced by the party you are evaluating, and reading them first anchors you. The register is produced by someone with no interest in the outcome, and it takes less time to consult. Doing it in that order means you either stop early or continue with a fact in hand rather than an impression.

Check four: are you being moved off official channels?

This is the strongest single signal, and it is worth understanding why it appears so consistently.

Official channels — the platform's own app, its published support system, an app-store listing, a registered domain — have logging, staff, verification and consequences. Almost everything that goes wrong requires you to be somewhere without those. So the request appears, framed helpfully: continue on a messaging app, use this link instead of the app store, let me screen-share to help you set it up, send the funds to this address and I will credit your account.

Any single one of those can have an innocent explanation. All of them share a property: they move you somewhere no one is keeping records.

The counter is mechanical and requires no judgement at all. Anything to do with money happens inside the platform's own app or website, reached your own way. Support is contacted from inside the app, never through a number or link someone gave you. If a person needs you to leave that, the answer is no — and you do not have to explain the answer.

Judging an influencer, which is a slightly different job

If the recommendation came from someone with an audience rather than someone you know, three of the four checks still apply and one changes.

The "what do they get" question becomes both easier and harder. Easier because the answer is usually obvious — referral links, sponsorship, an audience, sometimes a token position acquired before the promotion. Harder because disclosure practice is patchy, and an unmarked promotion looks exactly like an opinion.

Three things worth checking, none of which require you to evaluate their analysis:

• Do they disclose, consistently? Someone who marks paid content when it is paid is telling you something about the unmarked content too. Someone who never discloses anything is either never paid or never says.
• Have they ever said no? Search their history for something they declined to promote, or a position they got wrong and admitted. An account with no misses is not an account with good judgement; it is an account that does not publish them.
• Is there a deadline attached? The clock signal works identically here. A limited allocation, an early-access round, a code that expires — the pressure is doing the same job as it does in a private conversation.

Several countries now treat promoting crypto investments as a regulated financial promotion, with rules about risk warnings and who may issue them. If a promotion aimed at your country carries none of the warnings that local rules require, that is worth noticing as information about how carefully the promoter is operating.