How to Check an Overseas Employer Actually Exists

Checking that an overseas employer exists takes five separate lookups, and each one can be done from your phone before you send a single document. Find the legal entity in the company register of the country where the employer claims to be incorporated, and read the current filing rather than a screenshot someone sent you. Match the trading address on the offer letter to a building that exists and looks capable of housing the work described. Search the sponsor or licensed employer register where the destination country publishes one, because several do. Check that the recruiter's email address and phone number resolve to the same domain and switchboard as the company's own published contact details. Then look for a hiring footprint beyond the single advert you were shown: other vacancies, named staff, filed accounts, a trading history.

An employer that passes all five is probably a real company. An employer that fails one deserves a question. An employer that fails three is a name someone typed into a document.

This guide is general information. It describes how to check public registers, and it does not tell you whether any particular offer or visa route works for your case. A registered migration agent or an immigration lawyer in the destination country should confirm that. Every register named here is described as published at the time of writing, and registers get renamed, merged and moved. Open the issuing authority's own website and read the current version before you rely on anything below.

Who this applies to

You need this check if you are dealing with any of the following:

• A job offer that arrived unsolicited, through WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Facebook or email, from a company you did not apply to.
• An offer that came through a middleman: an agent, a recruiter, a "consultant", a relative's contact, a church or community group connection.
• An offer where the visa route depends on the employer being a licensed or approved sponsor.
• Any offer that will require you to pay money, quit a job, sell property, or send original documents before you have a visa in hand.
• An employer a friend or family member already used successfully. That history counts for something, and it still needs checking, because sponsorship arrangements get sold on and licences lapse between one hire and the next.

What a non-existent employer actually looks like

Very few fraudulent offers use a company name that does not appear anywhere. The common shapes are subtler:

The name that was never registered. A plausible sounding company name, a logo, a website built in a fortnight, and no matching entry in the national company register. The advert exists. The employer does not.

The dormant shell. A registered company that exists on paper, files no accounts or minimal ones, has one director, was incorporated recently, and has no operating history. The legal entity exists. The trading business capable of employing forty care workers does not.

The borrowed identity. A real, long established company whose name, registration number and address have been copied onto a fake offer letter. The register entry is genuine because the company is genuine. The person emailing you has nothing to do with it. This is the hardest one to catch on the register alone, which is why the domain and switchboard checks matter.

The real company with a licence it no longer holds. A trading business that was once an approved sponsor and is not any more, or that never held a licence for the route the offer names. The company exists, the visa route does not.

The real company that never authorised the vacancy. An agent uses a genuine client relationship, or none at all, to advertise a post the employer has not agreed to fill.

The five checks are designed to separate these. No single check does it alone.

Step one: find the legal entity in a company register

Nearly every country maintains a public register of incorporated companies, run by a named authority, and most allow free name and number searches. Search by the company name first, then by the registration number if the offer gives one. Read the entry itself, not a PDF or screenshot supplied by the recruiter.

What you are looking for on the register entry:

• Status. Active, in liquidation, dissolved, struck off, or in administration. A dissolved company cannot hire you.
• Incorporation date. A company incorporated three months ago that is offering international sponsorship is worth a hard question.
• Registered office address. Compare it to the address on the offer letter and to the address in the recruiter's signature.
• Directors and officers. Note the names. Search them.
• Filed accounts or annual returns. Where the register publishes them, they tell you whether the company trades at any scale. A company filing dormant or micro entity accounts is unlikely to be running a large hiring programme.
• Nature of business. The registered activity code should relate to the work you were offered.

Registers published at the time of writing, by issuing authority:

Two cautions. Federal structures split the register: a Canadian company may be incorporated provincially and appear nowhere in the federal search, and a US company may be registered in one state while operating in another, so check the province or state named in the address before you conclude the company is fake. And some registers charge for full documents while allowing free basic searches, where the free search usually answers the question. For a country not listed above, search "company register" plus the country name and confirm you have reached a government domain before entering anything.

Step two: match the trading address to something real

The registered office is a legal address, and it is often an accountant's office. The trading address is where the work happens, and that is the one to test.

Put the address into a mapping service and look at the street view imagery where it exists. You are asking a simple question: could the work described happen here? A logistics company with a warehouse operation should not be registered above a nail salon. A care provider recruiting fifty staff should not sit in a single serviced office room. A residential flat as the only address for a firm claiming three hundred employees is an answer in itself.

Then search the address itself as a text string. Addresses that host dozens of unrelated companies are usually company formation agents or virtual office providers. That is legal and common, and it also means the address tells you nothing about the business, so the other checks have to carry more weight.

Compare the three addresses you now have: the registered office, the trading address on the offer letter, and any address in the recruiter's signature or on the website's contact page. Where they diverge without explanation, ask for the explanation in writing.

Step three: check the sponsor or approved employer register where one is published

Several destination countries publish a list of employers approved to sponsor foreign workers, and where such a list exists it is the strongest single check available, because it is maintained by the immigration authority itself.

At the time of writing, the UK Home Office publishes a register of licensed sponsors covering workers, listing the organisation name, the town or city of a trading address, the routes it is licensed for and its rating. Our separate guide on how to read the UK register of licensed sponsors explains the columns and the traps in detail, including why a listing alone does not mean the specific job is real.

Other countries handle this differently. New Zealand operates employer accreditation for its main work visa route through Immigration New Zealand. Canada's system runs case by case through the Labour Market Impact Assessment and the employer portal, so there is no general public list of approved employers to search; what exists instead is a published list of employers found non compliant, which is worth searching for the opposite reason. Australia's sponsorship approvals sit with the Department of Home Affairs, and public searchability has changed over time.

The practical instruction is the same everywhere. Go to the immigration authority's own website for the destination country, search for a sponsor, accredited employer or approved employer list, and read the version published today. Do not rely on a list someone else compiled, a spreadsheet circulating in a WhatsApp group, or a PDF the recruiter emailed you. If no such list is published, say so to yourself plainly and lean harder on the register, the address and the footprint.

If you want a second opinion on an employer, a route and your own eligibility at the same time, our free assessment is where to start. It is a diagnostic, and it will tell you whether the route the offer names is one you could actually use. NextMigrate provides independent planning and guidance: a $499 roadmap covers a 60 minute call with a specialist, eligibility scoring for up to three countries and a written summary within 48 hours. We do not file, lodge or submit applications on your behalf, and we escalate to a licensed lawyer or a registered agent where a case needs one. Buying a roadmap has no effect on how any authority decides your case. Apply the same five checks to us that this article just gave you.

Step four: test whether the recruiter's contact resolves to the company

A real employee of a real company is reachable through that company's own infrastructure. Test it.

The email domain. A recruiter using gmail, outlook, yahoo, or a free webmail account to conduct international hiring for a mid sized company is a signal on its own. Where a corporate domain is used, check the spelling character by character against the domain you found independently through a search engine, not the one in the email. Substituted letters, added hyphens, and swapped country suffixes are the standard trick, and they survive a quick glance.

The domain age. Public WHOIS lookups show when a domain was registered. A company claiming twenty years of trading on a domain registered four months ago has a contradiction to explain.

The switchboard. Find the company's main phone number through an independent search, not from the offer letter, and call it. Ask for the person who contacted you, by name and department. This one check defeats the borrowed identity pattern, because a genuine company will simply say that no such person works there.

The named individual. Search the recruiter's name together with the company name. A hiring manager with no trace anywhere, or a profile created weeks ago with a handful of connections, is worth pausing on.

Step five: look for a hiring footprint beyond the single advert

Real employers that hire internationally leave traces. A company recruiting one worker from overseas is unusual. A company recruiting thirty leaves a trail.

Search for:

• Other vacancies. The same employer advertising other roles, on its own careers page and on mainstream job boards, in the same period.
• Named staff. Employees on professional networks who list the company, joined at different times, and post about ordinary work.
• Press, licensing or inspection records. A care provider, a school, a hospital, a construction firm and a transport operator are usually licensed or inspected by a sector regulator, and those registers are public in most countries.
• Trading history. Filed accounts, a tax registration number that validates, membership of a trade body, customer reviews that predate the job advert.
• The advert itself. Paste distinctive sentences from the job description into a search engine. Text lifted verbatim from another company's advert, or reused across many unrelated "employers", is a strong signal.

A missing footprint does not prove fraud, since small firms genuinely hire quietly. A missing footprint alongside an upfront fee request is a different matter.

Signals and what they mean

What it costs you to skip this

The money is the visible loss and often the smaller one. Whatever the amount, it tends to be paid through channels that do not reverse, such as a transfer to a personal account, a money transfer service, or cryptocurrency. Where you want a sense of the sums and patterns reported in your own country, the police or consumer protection authority that takes fraud reports there usually publishes them, and that published figure is the one to rely on rather than any number quoted to you second hand.

The larger cost sits in your immigration record. Where a fabricated offer letter, a false sponsorship document or an invented employment history reaches an immigration authority in your name, the consequence can go well beyond a plain refusal. It can be a misrepresentation finding, which travels with you and affects applications to other countries that share information. Our guides on misrepresentation findings versus plain refusals and what your options are after a misrepresentation ban go through this. Ban lengths and thresholds are set by each country and they change, so confirm the current position with the destination country's immigration authority or a lawyer before you assume anything about your own case.

When the employer is real and the offer is still wrong

Passing all five checks tells you the company exists. It does not tell you the arrangement is lawful.

A genuine, registered, licensed employer can still be part of an arrangement where the job is nominal and what is really being sold is the sponsorship. It can also be an employer whose contract loads recovery clauses onto you. And in several countries, paying for a job offer or for a sponsorship document is an offence for the person paying, separate from any fraud committed against them. Read why paying for a job offer or an LMIA is a crime before you agree to anything that involves money moving toward the employer, and employer bonds and clawback clauses before you sign a contract that lets the employer recover costs from you later.

Common mistakes

Accepting a screenshot as verification. A registration number, a licence certificate and a register page are all trivially faked as images. Every check in this guide has to be run by you, on the issuing authority's own site.

Searching for the trading name only. Many businesses trade under a name different from the registered one. Search both, and search the registration number.

Treating a website as evidence. A website costs very little and takes an afternoon. It is the weakest signal available and it is the one people rely on most.

Concluding "not on the register" too fast. Check the spelling, the legal suffix, the province or state, and whether the entity is a branch of a foreign parent. Then conclude.

Verifying the employer and forgetting the agent. The company can be entirely real while the person between you and it has no connection to it. Our guide on how to check a migration agent is licensed covers the regulator registers, including the OISC lineage in the UK, the Office of the MARA in Australia and the CICC in Canada.

Doing the checks after paying. The order matters as much as the checks.

What to do next

Work through the five checks in order and write down what each one returned. Keep the offer letter, the adverts, the messages and the payment requests. If you have already paid, or already sent documents, read how to avoid immigration scams for the reporting channels by country and act on the banking steps the same day, because reversal windows are short.

If you are not sure whether the route named in your offer even applies to your occupation and qualifications, that is a separate question worth answering before you spend more energy on the employer. Start with the free assessment and we will tell you what your realistic options look like.

This article is part of our guide to how to vet anyone who offers to help you migrate, which covers the same interrogation applied to consultants, colleges, test centres and agents. Two siblings sit close to this one: visa farms and sponsorship for sale explains what happens when the employer is real and the job is not, and twelve red flags to check before you pay any migration fee is the shorter checklist to run before money moves. If the employer turns out to be real and honest, what an honest migration service does sets out what any paid helper can and cannot do for you from there.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I verify an overseas employer is real?

Run five checks. Search the company in the national company register run by the relevant authority, such as Companies House in the UK, ACRA in Singapore, the KVK in the Netherlands or the Secretary of State in the relevant US state, and read the live entry. Match the trading address to a real building on a map. Search the destination country's sponsor or accredited employer list where the immigration authority publishes one. Confirm the recruiter's email domain and phone number resolve to the company's own published contact details by calling a switchboard number you found independently. Look for a hiring footprint: other vacancies, named staff, filed accounts, sector licensing. Registers change names and locations, so open the issuing authority's site and use the current version.

The company is on the register. Does that mean the job offer is genuine?

No. Registration proves a legal entity exists. It says nothing about whether that entity authorised the vacancy, holds a sponsorship licence for your route, or has any connection to the person who contacted you. The borrowed identity pattern relies on exactly this: the register entry is genuine because the company is genuine, and the offer is fabricated. The switchboard call and the sponsor list check are what close that gap.

What if the country has no public company register I can search?

Some jurisdictions have no free public search, publish only in a local language, or restrict access to registered users. Shift weight onto the checks that do not depend on the register: the trading address, the sector licensing register, the domain and switchboard test, and the hiring footprint. You can also ask the employer for its trade licence or commercial registration number, then verify that number with the issuing ministry or economic department directly, using contact details from the ministry's own site.

The employer wants a fee for visa processing. Is that ever normal?

Treat it as a stop signal and check the rules for the specific country and route with the immigration authority that publishes them. Several destinations place sponsorship and licence costs on the employer by law and prohibit passing them to the worker, and in some, a worker paying for a job offer or a sponsorship document commits an offence. Complete the five checks first, and if the fee question decides your case, get it confirmed by a registered adviser or a lawyer in that country.

How recent does the register entry need to be?

Read today's version, not a cached page and not a document sent to you. Company status changes, sponsor licences are granted, downgraded, suspended and revoked, and registers are usually updated on a rolling or scheduled basis. A listing you checked two months ago is not current for a decision you are making today. Where the register shows an update date, note it.

Can I ask the employer to prove it holds a sponsorship licence?

Yes, and a genuine employer will not be troubled by the question. Ask which route it is licensed for and under what organisation name it appears on the destination country's list, then verify that name yourself on the published list. Do not accept a certificate image as the proof. Where the country publishes no list, ask instead how the employer has sponsored workers previously and check whether that history is visible anywhere.

Should I pay someone to verify an employer for me?

You can do all five checks yourself for free, and you should, because you will then know what the registers actually said. Paid help earns its place on the question the registers cannot answer, which is whether the route fits your occupation, your qualifications and your timeline. If you do pay someone, apply this same article to them: check their registration with the relevant regulator, find their entity in the company register, and confirm their contact details resolve to their own domain.

The bottom line

An employer that exists can be found in a register, at an address, on a licence list, behind a switchboard, and in a hiring trail. Five lookups, thirty minutes, no cost. Do them in that order, before any money or original document leaves your hands, and read the current version of every register you open. Where anything in your own case turns on the answer, have a registered migration agent or an immigration lawyer in the destination country confirm it.