01
A supply house with no site history
An established yard leaves years of archived pages behind. A brand-new record on a supplier who claims decades is the tell, and it shows up most on deposit-first material orders.
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Construction & trades: one score out of 1,000 in about 10 seconds
Money leaves a job four ways: a deposit to hold material pricing, a subcontractor draw against completed work, a material order billed on terms, and a pay application released after approval. Each one is approved against a schedule and sent the same day, and each one arrives as an email from a company somebody on the job vouched for.
A project manager, an accounts-payable clerk, or the office manager approving the draw — whoever is holding the invoice. Paste the email address or the web address, read the reasons, and make the call. The first check needs no account.
Typical wire $5K – $150K · illustrative transaction size, not a loss estimate
What matters here
3 tells that carry the most weight
02
A changed remit-to mid-project
The invoice looks right because it is right. The email around it was the part that changed. A re-check on the sending domain shows whether anything about that record moved.
03
A lookalike of a regional distributor
One swapped letter in a well-known distributor's name passes a busy read of an email signature, especially on a sub you have paid before through a different address.
What a check reads
5 public record types, every time
On a job, the archive history matters most: a supply house that has served the region for decades has a long trail, and a page put up for this quarter does not.
How the score is built- Registration date
- When the web address was first registered, and who the registrar is, straight from the domain record.
- Mail setup
- Whether the domain can receive mail at all, and whether it has sender rules that stop other people sending as it.
- Site and archive history
- Whether the site answers today, what it says it is, and how far back an archived copy of it goes.
- Near-match names
- Whether the address is a one-character or one-word variant of a better-known name.
- Free and throwaway inboxes
- Whether a commercial quote arrived from a consumer provider or a disposable inbox.
Before the money leaves
5 steps a score cannot do for you
- 01Call the yard or the sub on a number from the original contract or their website, not the number on the invoice asking for money.
- 02Any change to remit-to details, bank, or bank country stops the payment until a person you already know confirms it by voice.
- 03Ask for the business registration or contractor licence number and check it yourself against the public registry.
- 04Split a first material deposit where you can: part now, the balance on delivery paperwork.
- 05Screenshot the invoice, the sending address, and the bank details before releasing the draw.
A worked example
How one of these reads
The situation
A lumber and steel supplier sends a quote and asks for a 30% deposit to hold pricing.
What the record says
The domain is four months old, mail is configured but has no sender rules, and there is no archived site before this year.
The reading
Caution band, with the young registration and missing history as the stated reasons — enough to make a callback first.
Illustrative example built from the record types a check reads — registration dates, mail setup, site history, and near-match names. Not a real vendor.
Questions we get
4 questions, answered straight
How do I check if a supplier or subcontractor is legitimate?
Paste their email address or website. You get a score out of 1,000 in about 10 seconds, plus the reasons: how old the web address is, whether its mail has sender rules, how far back the site history goes, and whether the name is a near-copy of a known distributor.
A supplier emailed new bank details mid-project. Is that normal?
It happens, and it is also the most common way money is lost on a job. Treat it as fraud until a voice call on a number you already had confirms it. Re-run a check on the sending web address at the same time.
Can a check verify a contractor licence or a lien history?
No. Licences, registrations, liens, and credit are not part of a check. Those come from state and county records you look up yourself. A check reads the digital record behind the email and the web address.
Does this work for pay applications, not just new vendors?
Yes. The email address is the input, so you can run the same check on a pay application or an invoice from someone you have paid before — that is exactly when a swapped address shows up.
What a score does not say
A score reads public records about an email address or a web address. It is an observation, not a guarantee, and it does not tell you whether a specific payment is safe. The manual steps still matter.
Built and run by a named person, not an anonymous site — who is behind this and how the score is built.
Building this into software your industry already uses? For platforms.
Paste the vendor's email address or website. About 10 seconds.
Run a free check