20. Search Companies/Charities Online

While some scammers will claim to be from legitimate companies and charities, some will make up their own, so one way to absolutely guarantee that an email is from a scammer is to search if the company they’re claiming to be from is a legitimate one.

Therefore, we suggest doing a thorough search online for the company your potential scammer is from (using tools like uscompanieslist.com, for example). If you can’t find any evidence of it, there’s probably a good reason for that (although we should stress that, just because an email does appear to come from a legitimate company, that still doesn’t guarantee it isn’t a scam).