How to Verify a Software Company Is Legitimate

We are writing this from an unusual position: people are currently running scams using our company name.

Two strangers contacted us this year to ask whether we were real. One had been told they could earn “$100–$400 daily” uploading product data on the “Teamz Lab LTD platform” — a platform that does not exist. Another had been approached by an online trading operation using our name. We do not run a trading business and never have.

Both people did the right thing: they went and checked. One of them had already been given a fake login and a fake “trainer” before the doubt set in.

So this guide is not theoretical. These are the checks we tell people to run on us — and they work on any software company, agency, or employer.

The ten-minute version

If you only do one thing, do this: find the company’s legal registration, then find something the company made. A scammer can fake a website in an hour. Faking a registration record and a public product history is much harder.

Everything below is elaboration on those two moves.

1. Look up the legal entity, not the website

Almost every country has a free public register of companies:

UK — Companies House. Free, no account. Shows incorporation date, registered address, directors, filing history, and whether the company is active or dissolved.
US — the Secretary of State register for the relevant state.
Australia — ASIC.
India — MCA.
Netherlands — KvK.
Most of the EU — the national business register, often linked through e-Justice.

What you are checking is not just existence. Check:

Does the registered name exactly match the name on the website and the emails? “Teamz Lab LTD” and “Teamz Labs Ltd” are different companies. Scammers rely on you not noticing a letter.
Is it active, or dissolved / in liquidation?
When was it incorporated? A company registered three weeks ago that claims ten years of experience is telling you something.
Do the directors’ names appear anywhere else connected to this business?

⚠️ A registration number is necessary, not sufficient. Registering a company is cheap and takes minutes in most countries. Scammers do register real companies. A number that checks out means “this entity exists”, not “these people are honest.” That is why step 2 matters more.

For us: Teamz Lab LTD, UK, Companies House 16106867. Look it up — do not take our word for it.

2. Find something they actually made

This is the check that scammers cannot pass, and it is the one most people skip.

Real software companies leave public traces that take years to accumulate and cannot be bought quickly:

App store developer pages. Both Apple and Google run a verified developer account per publisher, showing every app they have released. Apps have review counts, ratings, and update histories going back years.
A code presence — GitHub or similar.
Client-visible work — case studies with named clients you can independently contact, not stock photos with invented first names.
A freelance-platform profile with a completed-job history and reviews the platform verified, not the company.

For us: our apps are public on Google Play and the App Store, and our work is at /portfolio/. Install one. Read the reviews. That is a history you cannot fabricate in a week.

The inversion that catches fakes: ask a company to name something they have shipped that you can use today, for free, without talking to them. A real company answers instantly. A fake one wants a meeting first.

3. Check the domain and the email

Does their email use their own domain? A software company writing from @gmail.com is not automatically fake, but combined with anything else on this list, it should stop you.
How old is the domain? A WHOIS lookup shows registration date. A domain created last month behind a company claiming a decade of history is a contradiction.
Does the domain exactly match the company name? Lookalike domains — an extra letter, .co instead of .com, a hyphen — are the single most common impersonation trick.

That last point is the one that got the people who contacted us. They were talking to someone who used our name, and neither of them initially checked whether the person had anything to do with our actual domain.

4. The money test — this is where scams reveal themselves

Almost every scam eventually asks you for money, and almost every legitimate company never does when it is hiring or partnering.

These are near-certain scam signals. There is no legitimate version of any of them:

A training fee, onboarding fee, or “activation” payment
Buying your own equipment through them specifically
A deposit to “unlock” work, an account, or a platform
Payment in crypto, gift cards, or wire transfer to an individual
Being asked to receive money and forward part of it — this is money laundering, and it makes you the person the bank pursues
Cheque overpayment — you are paid too much and asked to return the difference

Legitimate employers and partners pay you. They do not take payments from you to give you work.

Two subtler ones:

Earnings that are specific, high, and guaranteed. “$100–$400 daily for 1–2 hours from your phone” — the pitch used with our name — is not how any real business describes income. Real work has variable, uncertain pay.
A “platform” with a login you were given by a person, rather than one you signed up for yourself from the company’s real website. Fake dashboards showing fake balances are standard equipment in these operations.

5. Check the person, separately from the company

The most common attack is not a fake company. It is a real company’s name attached to a person who has no connection to it.

Ask for their work email at the company domain, then email them at it — independently, not by replying to whatever they contacted you from.
Check whether the person’s professional profile actually lists that employer, and whether the profile has history or was created recently.
Contact the company through a channel you found yourself — the number or email on the company’s own website, found via search, not any contact detail the person gave you.

That last step is the whole game. A scammer controls every channel they hand you. The only useful verification is one they had no chance to intercept.

Both people who contacted us did exactly this, and it is how they found out.

6. Read the pressure

Scams need speed, because scrutiny kills them. Legitimate businesses do not:

Deadlines measured in hours for something that should take days
Discouraging you from discussing it with family, a bank, or a lawyer
Refusing a video call, or only ever appearing on chat
Moving you off a platform immediately — from a job site to WhatsApp or Telegram in the first message
Getting irritated when you ask verification questions

A real company is not offended by being checked. We would rather someone spent ten minutes verifying us than took our word for it — every person who verifies us is a person a scammer cannot use our name on.

What is genuinely hard to fake

Ranked by how much confidence each earns you:

Signal	Confidence	Why
Shipped products with multi-year review history	Highest	Cannot be bought or rushed
Verified escrow/platform history with completed jobs	High	The platform verified it, not the company
Named clients you can independently contact	High	Requires real relationships
Company registration	Medium	Real, but cheap and fast to obtain
Professional-network profiles	Low–Medium	Trivially fabricated in bulk
A polished website	Near zero	An afternoon’s work
Testimonials on their own site	Near zero	Unverifiable by construction

Most people check in exactly the wrong order — website first, products never.

If you have already been caught

Stop paying immediately. Sunk cost is the lever they pull hardest; “one more fee to release your balance” is the core of the model.
Contact your bank or card issuer now. Card and bank transfers sometimes have recovery routes. Crypto and gift cards effectively do not.
Report it to your national fraud body — Action Fraud (UK), the FTC (US), Scamwatch (Australia), your national police cybercrime unit.
Tell the impersonated company. They usually have no idea, and they cannot file takedowns for something they have not been told about. This genuinely helps.
Do not blame yourself. These operations are professionally run, they rehearse the script, and the people who contacted us are intelligent and careful. Checking late is still checking.

Checking us specifically

Since our name is being misused, here is everything, in one place:

Teamz Lab LTD, registered in the United Kingdom, Companies House 16106867
Apps on Google Play and the App Store
Work and case studies at /portfolio/, the people at /team/
Client work runs through Upwork milestone escrow — the platform holds funds and releases them when the client approves the deliverable

And, plainly:

We do not run a trading platform. We have no “platform” with logins or product-upload work. We never charge anyone a fee to work with us, in any form, ever. If someone using our name asks you for money, they are not us.

If you are unsure whether someone contacting you is genuinely from Teamz Lab, ask us through the contact details on this site — the ones you found yourself, by coming here — and we will tell you yes or no.