A small business buying from an unknown supplier faces the worst version of information asymmetry: the wire goes out Monday, the container (or doesn't) arrives in six weeks. Enterprise buyers hire diligence firms. A shop owner buying $8k of stock from a new vendor has Google and a bad feeling.
The public record is better than people think, and an afternoon of disciplined searching beats $8k of hope. The pass I run, in order:
1. Name archaeology. Search the exact company name in quotes, then name + "complaint", name + "scam", in the supplier's language too. Not Google's first page — the second page: forum threads, chamber-of-commerce registry listings, old trade-show directories. A real firm has a paper trail with years on it. A fresh registration with a matching-domain website created this quarter is the pattern to fear.
2. Registry cross-check. Most countries expose company registries publicly (UK Companies House, Poland's KRS, Turkey's trade registry gazettes). Three fields settle most cases: registration date, declared capital, and named directors. A company registered 40 days ago with minimum capital and a director whose name appears on 200 companies is a shell-shaped object.
3. Digital footprint coherence. The site, the LinkedIn, the directory listing, and the email domain should tell one consistent story with consistent dates. Fabricated footprints leak at the seams: a "15 years exporting" site whose domain registered in March, a LinkedIn company page with 3 employees created last month, a mail domain that fails DMARC.
4. The Telegram layer. For goods in electronics, cosmetics, supplements, auto parts — wholesale channels are on public Telegram. The t.me/s/ preview (no login) exposes who sells that product at what price in what currency. If the supplier's price is 30% under the channel median, that's not a deal; that's the story.
5. The two-question call. Everything public is context. The final 10% is one phone call asking two specific things: "What's your factory's address? I'd like to verify on the registry." and "Can you send last month's bill of lading with the reference redacted?" Real exporters answer instantly with documents. Resellers of resellers go quiet.
This is the entire discipline of OSINT pointed at one invoice: public sources, timestamped, cross-checked, no scraping behind logins, no leaked documents. The buyer who runs it pays nothing for data and everything for the sequence — the order of checks is the product.
I packaged the sequence, the registry links by country, and the Telegram channel grading rubric into my Telegram & Web OSINT Bundle ($5). For a one-off deal, a sample brief shows the output format, pay what you want.
The engineering lesson: diligence is not a dataset problem. Five free sources, checked in the right order, outclass a paid database checked lazily.
Runs free on GitHub Actions - no server, no paid APIs.
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