How to verify any company in five minutes (without Forenzio)

A manual due-diligence checklist anyone can run. We'd rather you trust the methodology than the brand.

You don't need a tool to do a five-minute company check. You need a checklist, the patience to actually run it, and a way to know when to stop. Here's the checklist we use ourselves when we want to verify something fast without firing up Forenzio.

Minute 1 — Does it exist?

Look up the company in the registry for the jurisdiction it claims. UK: Companies House. US: state Secretary of State sites. EU: country-level registries (Handelsregister for Germany, etc.). Confirm the legal name, registration date, and registered address.

Three failure modes here: no record at all, a record under a different legal name, or a record in a jurisdiction completely different from what the site claims. Any of these = stop and dig deeper before you engage further.

Minute 2 — How old is the domain?

Run a WHOIS lookup on the company's primary domain. A company claiming a 10-year history with a 6-week-old domain is lying about one or the other. Quick check: free WHOIS tools, or just look at the Internet Archive for the domain — if there are no captures before this year for a 'long-established' firm, that's a red flag.

Minute 3 — Where do the employees live?

Search LinkedIn for current employees at the company. Look for: (1) does the count roughly match the company's claimed size, (2) do the profiles look real (long histories, endorsements, connections to people in the same industry), (3) are senior roles filled by people with verifiable past roles at known firms?

Two failure modes: way fewer employees than claimed, or a wave of profiles all created within the same recent window with thin histories.

Minute 4 — Does the world talk about them?

Search the company name in Google News for the last 12 months, then last 5 years. A real B2B firm of any meaningful size has independent press coverage — industry trade press, customer case studies, conference appearances. If the only results are press-release wires and pay-to-play directories, that's thin.

Exception: very small early-stage companies legitimately have thin press. Adjust your expectation by stage.

Minute 5 — Sanctions and legal

Run the company name (and any beneficial owners you found in the registry) against the OFAC sanctions list and your local equivalent (EU consolidated list, UK HMT). Quick web search for the company name plus 'lawsuit', 'fraud', 'investigation'. Anything substantive that comes back deserves a careful read.

When to stop

If everything checks out in five minutes, you have a green-yellow signal. Not a guarantee, but enough for routine engagement — replying to an outreach, attending a call, sending a CV. For bigger commitments (signing a contract, accepting an offer, wiring money) you should spend longer or use a tool that can cross-reference more sources than you can in five minutes.

If anything fails at any step, stop and dig in before going further. Five minutes of doubt now beats weeks of cleanup later.

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