Updated · NextMigrate Team
How to Check an Overseas Employer Actually Exists
Imagine you are a care worker in Harare. Your wages barely cover rent and school fees, and the power goes off most evenings. One night a WhatsApp message arrives: a care home abroad needs staff, sponsorship included, start in two months. There is a logo, an offer letter with your name on it, and a friendly recruiter who replies within minutes.
Your heart jumps. This could change everything for your children.
Then comes the next message: a "processing fee" to secure the visa slot, paid to a personal account, this week.
You want to believe it. You also feel something is off. Both your hope and that feeling deserve respect. The way to honour both is to check.
The short answer: You can check an overseas employer in five free lookups from your phone, before you send money or documents. Find the company in the official company register and read the live entry. Match the address on the offer letter to a real building. Search the destination's sponsor or approved employer list, if it publishes one. Check that the recruiter's email and phone lead back to the company's own published contacts. Then look for a hiring footprint beyond one advert. Pass all five, and the company is probably real. Fail one, ask a question. Fail three, and it is likely just a name someone typed into a document.
This guide is general information about public registers. It cannot tell you whether a specific offer or visa route works for you. A registered migration agent or immigration lawyer in the destination country should confirm that. Registers get renamed and moved, so always read the current version on the authority's own site.
Who should run these checks
- The offer arrived out of the blue, on WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Facebook or email.
- It came through a middleman: an agent, a "consultant", a relative's contact, a church or community group.
- The visa depends on the employer being a licensed sponsor.
- You are asked to pay, quit a job, sell property or send original documents before you have a visa.
- A friend used this employer before. Still check, because licences lapse between one hire and the next.
What a fake employer really looks like
Most scams are subtler than a name that appears nowhere.
- Never registered. A believable name, a logo, a website built in a fortnight, and no register entry.
- The empty shell. A company on paper with one director, tiny accounts and no trading history. It cannot employ forty care workers.
- The borrowed identity. A real company whose name, number and address are copied onto a fake letter. Like someone in a hospital uniform bought online: the uniform is real, the person does not work there. The register cannot catch this. The email and phone checks can.
- The lapsed licence. A real company that is no longer, or never was, a sponsor for the route named.
- The unposted job. An agent advertises a role the employer never agreed to fill.
No single check catches all of these. Together, the five do.
Step 1: Find the company in the official register
Most countries run a free public company register. Search the name, then the registration number. Read the live entry yourself, never a screenshot from the recruiter.
What to look for:
- Status. Active, in liquidation, dissolved, struck off or in administration. A dissolved company cannot hire you.
- Incorporation date. A company set up three months ago offering sponsorship deserves a hard question.
- Registered address. Compare it with the offer letter and the recruiter's signature.
- Directors. Note the names and search them.
- Filed accounts. Dormant or micro-entity accounts rarely go with a big hiring programme.
- Type of business. It should match the work offered.
Registers published at the time of writing:
| Country | Register | Issuing authority |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Companies House register of companies | Companies House, an executive agency of the Department for Business and Trade |
| Ireland | Companies Registration Office register | Companies Registration Office (CRO) |
| Canada | Corporations Canada federal corporation search, plus each province's own registry | Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and provincial registrars |
| Australia | ABN Lookup and the ASIC company register | Australian Business Register (administered by the ATO) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission |
| New Zealand | Companies Register | New Zealand Companies Office, part of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment |
| Germany | Handelsregister | The German register courts (Registergerichte), published through the common register portal |
| Netherlands | Handelsregister | Kamer van Koophandel (KVK) |
| Singapore | Business entity search | Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) |
| United States | State business entity search | The Secretary of State (or equivalent) of the state of incorporation |
| United Arab Emirates | Trade licence verification | The economic department of the relevant emirate, or the relevant free zone authority |
| Saudi Arabia | Commercial registration lookup | Ministry of Commerce |
In federal countries the register is split. A Canadian company may sit only in a provincial register, and a US company may be registered in one state and work in another. Check the right province or state before deciding it is fake. The free basic search usually answers your question. For other countries, search "company register" plus the country name, and confirm you are on a government website.
Step 2: Match the address to a real place
The registered office is often just an accountant's office. Test the trading address, where the work happens.
Look it up on a map and on street view. Ask: could this work happen here? A care provider hiring fifty staff should not sit in one serviced office room. A flat as the only address for a firm claiming three hundred employees is an answer in itself.
Search the address as text too. An address hosting dozens of unrelated companies is usually a virtual office. That is legal, but it tells you nothing, so lean on the other checks. If the register, offer letter and recruiter's addresses differ with no reason, ask why in writing.
Step 3: Check the sponsor or approved employer list
Where a destination publishes a list of approved sponsors, it is your strongest single check, because the immigration authority keeps it.
At the time of writing, the UK Home Office publishes a register of licensed sponsors for workers, with the organisation name, town or city, licensed routes and rating. Our guide on how to read the UK register of licensed sponsors explains why a listing alone does not prove the job is real.
Other countries differ. New Zealand runs employer accreditation through Immigration New Zealand. Canada decides case by case through the Labour Market Impact Assessment and the employer portal, so there is no public list of approved employers, but there is a published list of employers found non-compliant. In Australia, sponsorship approvals sit with the Department of Home Affairs, and how searchable they are has changed over time.
Everywhere, read today's version on the immigration authority's own site. Not a WhatsApp spreadsheet, not a PDF from the recruiter. If no list exists, lean harder on the other checks.
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Step 4: Test whether the recruiter leads back to the company
The email domain. A recruiter hiring internationally from Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo is a warning sign. If a company domain is used, compare it letter by letter with the domain you find through your own search. A swapped letter, extra hyphen or different country ending is the classic trick.
The domain age. Free WHOIS lookups show when a domain was registered. Twenty years of trading on a domain registered four months ago needs explaining.
The switchboard. Find the main number yourself, not from the offer letter. Call and ask for the recruiter by name and department. This one call defeats the borrowed identity scam.
The named person. Search the recruiter's name with the company name. No trace anywhere, or a profile a few weeks old, is a reason to pause.
Step 5: Look for a hiring footprint
Real employers leave tracks, like footprints in sand. A company recruiting thirty people leaves a trail.
- Other vacancies on its careers page and mainstream job boards.
- Named staff on professional networks who joined at different times.
- Licensing or inspection records. Care homes, schools, hospitals, builders and transport firms are usually on public sector registers.
- Trading history. Filed accounts, a valid tax number, reviews older than the advert.
- The advert itself. Search a distinctive sentence from it. Text reused by many unrelated "employers" is a strong signal.
Small firms do hire quietly. But no footprint plus an upfront fee is a different story.
Signals and what they mean
| Signal | What it means | How to verify |
|---|---|---|
| No entry in the national company register | The legal entity may not exist, or it is registered in another jurisdiction or under a different trading name | Search the register run by the issuing authority for the country, then search the trading name and the number separately |
| Register entry active but incorporated weeks ago | Possible shell created for the offer, or a genuine new business with no capacity to sponsor | Check filed accounts, director history, and whether the company appears on any sponsor or accredited employer list |
| Registered office is a serviced office shared by many companies | Common and legal, and it tells you nothing about the business | Test the separate trading address, the switchboard and the hiring footprint instead |
| Recruiter emails from a free webmail account | The contact is not verifiably connected to the company | Call the company's independently found switchboard and ask for them by name |
| Corporate domain that differs by one character from the real one | Impersonation of a genuine employer | Compare against the domain returned by an independent search, and check domain registration date |
| Company exists but is absent from the sponsor or accredited employer list | The employer may not be able to sponsor the route named in the offer | Read the current list published by the destination country's immigration authority |
| Offer letter address differs from the register address with no explanation | Could be an ordinary trading site, or a fabricated letter | Ask in writing, and check both addresses on a map |
| Vacancy appears only in one advert, in one group, with no careers page listing | Possible fabricated or unauthorised vacancy | Search the company's own careers page and mainstream boards for the same role |
| You are asked for money before any of the above can be checked | The sequence itself is the warning | Stop the payment. Complete the checks first |
| The employer or agent discourages you from contacting the company directly | A genuine employer has no reason to object | Contact the published general address anyway |
What skipping the checks can cost
The money is the visible loss, and often the smaller one. It usually goes in ways that cannot be reversed: a personal account, a money transfer service, or cryptocurrency. Your country's police or consumer protection body usually publishes the real sums and patterns.
The bigger cost is your immigration record. If a fake offer letter or sponsorship document reaches an immigration authority in your name, you can face a misrepresentation finding, not just a refusal. It follows you, including to countries that share information. Our guides on misrepresentation findings versus plain refusals and your options after a misrepresentation ban explain this. Ban lengths are set by each country and change, so confirm the current rules with the immigration authority or a lawyer.
When the employer is real but the offer is still wrong
Passing all five checks proves the company exists. It does not prove the deal is lawful.
A genuine, licensed employer can still be selling sponsorship for a job that does not exist, or load costs back onto you by contract. And in several countries, paying for a job offer or sponsorship document is an offence by the person who pays, even if they were cheated too.
Before any money moves toward an employer, read why paying for a job offer or an LMIA is a crime. Before you sign a contract that lets the employer recover costs later, read employer bonds and clawback clauses.
Common mistakes
- Accepting a screenshot as proof. Images are easy to fake. Run every check yourself.
- Searching only the trading name. Search the registered name and number too.
- Trusting a website. It takes an afternoon to build. It is the weakest signal, and the one people rely on most.
- Deciding "not on the register" too fast. Check spelling, the legal ending (Ltd, GmbH, Pty), the province or state, and foreign parent companies.
- Checking the employer but not the agent. The company can be real while the middleman has no link 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.
- Checking after paying. The order matters as much as the checks.
What to do next
Run the five checks in order and note what each showed. Keep the offer letter, adverts, messages and payment requests.
If you have already paid or sent documents, please do not blame yourself. These schemes are built by professionals to fool careful people. Read how to avoid immigration scams for reporting channels, and call your bank the same day, because reversal windows are short.
More in this series: how to vet anyone who offers to help you migrate, visa farms and sponsorship for sale (a real employer, a fake job), twelve red flags to check before you pay any migration fee, and what an honest migration service does.
Frequently asked questions
How do I verify an overseas employer is real?
Run five checks. Read the live entry in the national register, 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. Match the trading address to a real building. Search the destination's sponsor list if one is published. Call a switchboard number you found yourself. Look for a hiring footprint: other vacancies, named staff, filed accounts.
The company is on the register. Does that mean the job offer is genuine?
No. It proves a legal entity exists, not that it posted the job, holds a sponsor licence, or knows the person contacting you. The switchboard call and sponsor list close that gap.
What if the country has no public company register I can search?
Lean on the other checks: address, sector licences, domain and switchboard, footprint. You can also ask for the trade licence or commercial registration number and verify it with the issuing ministry, 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. Several destinations make employers pay sponsorship costs and ban passing them to workers. In some, a worker who pays for a job offer commits an offence. Do the five checks, then have a registered adviser or lawyer in that country confirm the fee rules.
Can I ask the employer to prove it holds a sponsorship licence?
Yes. A genuine employer will not mind. Ask which route and exact organisation name, then check the current published list yourself. Do not accept a certificate image. A listing from two months ago is not current.
Should I pay someone to verify an employer for me?
You can do all five checks free, and you should. Paid help is useful for what registers cannot answer: does the route fit your job and qualifications? If you pay someone, check them the same way.
The bottom line
A real employer 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, before any money or original document leaves your hands. Your hope for a better job is valid. Protect it. Where your case depends on the answer, ask a registered migration agent or immigration lawyer in the destination country.
