The Verification Kit

Every register, every message, every step, before your money leaves your account.

Which of these is you?

• Somebody is asking you for money this week. Start at "The sixty second check".
• A person abroad says he will arrange a UK job and the visa together, one payment. Go to "The check a bundle cannot pass".
• You are choosing between two agents and both of them look real. Read "Can this person legally charge you" and "What a real offer actually contains".
• You have already paid and something now feels wrong. Go straight to "If you have already paid".

The sixty second check

Do this on your phone, in this order, before you reply to anybody.

1. Open the official register for the country involved. For a UK employer, the register of licensed sponsors. For a UK immigration adviser, find an immigration adviser. For a Canadian consultant, the College's public register.
2. Search the exact legal name you were given. Not the trading name on the flyer. Not the name on the office signboard.
3. If nothing comes up, ask for the exact spelling once, and search again.
4. Ask the four questions in "The messages to send tonight".
5. Wait for the written answer. Do not pay while you are waiting.

That is the whole method. Everything below is the detail behind each step.

Can this person legally charge you?

Canada

This one is not a matter of opinion. Canadian law says that no person shall knowingly, directly or indirectly, represent or advise a person for consideration in an immigration matter unless they are one of these: a lawyer or notary in good standing with a provincial law society or the Chambre des notaires du Québec, another member in good standing of a provincial law society such as a paralegal, or a member in good standing of the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants. That is the complete list.

The same section sets the penalty for breaking it: on conviction by indictment, a fine of up to two hundred thousand Canadian dollars, which is around ₦196m, or two years in prison, or both. On summary conviction, up to forty thousand Canadian dollars, around ₦39m, or six months, or both.

Read that again slowly, because it changes how you should feel when you ask for a licence number. You are not being difficult. You are asking a regulated professional to show the thing the law requires him to have.

Run it: ask for the College licence number, then search the public register by name, College ID or company.

Source: Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, section 91.

United Kingdom

The UK rule is the same shape. Government guidance states that all immigration advisers must be registered with the Immigration Advice Authority or be a member of an approved professional body, and the same page carries the adviser finder plus the links to the Law Society, the Law Society of Scotland, the Law Society of Northern Ireland, the Bar Council's Direct Access scheme, the Faculty of Advocates and the Bar of Northern Ireland.

There is a second page most people never open, and it is the one that matters when a name "sounds familiar": the list of immigration advisers currently prohibited or suspended by direction of the Immigration Services Tribunal. A name can be off the register because it was removed, not because it was never there.

Source: gov.uk, find an immigration adviser and the list of prohibited or suspended immigration advisers (last updated 26 August 2025).

Is this employer allowed to sponsor you?

The Home Office publishes the full register of licensed sponsors for workers as a downloadable file, showing each organisation, the category of worker it may sponsor, and its sponsorship rating. It is not a yearly publication. The file is republished constantly, often on consecutive working days, and the copy live while this page was written carried the date 17 August 2026.

That frequency is the point. A licence can be suspended or revoked between one Tuesday and the next, so a screenshot an agent sends you is not evidence of anything. Only the file you download yourself, today, counts.

Search the exact registered company name. If the company he named is not in that file, the conversation is over, and it does not matter how good the job description looked.

Source: gov.uk, register of licensed sponsors (workers).

What a real offer actually contains

Scammers imitate documents. They do not imitate systems, because they cannot. Learn the difference and the fakes fall apart in your hand.

Sources: gov.uk, certificates of sponsorship and gov.uk, Skilled Worker visa.

So the question that ends a fake conversation is not "can I see the CoS." It is "what is the certificate number, and which registered company issued it." A number can be checked. A JPEG cannot.

What is free, and what is never free

Two facts to keep in your chest.

The UK's digital immigration status, the eVisa, has replaced physical immigration documents, and the government's own page says plainly that you do not need to pay to set up a UKVI account or access your eVisa. Anybody charging you a fee to "activate your eVisa" is charging you for air.

Source: gov.uk, eVisa.

And on the Canadian side, the rule about who may charge you (above) is about advice and representation. Nobody, anywhere, can promise you an outcome, because only the immigration authority decides. A guarantee is not a strong offer. It is a confession.

The check a bundle cannot pass

This is the one that catches people who passed everything else.

The desire behind the bundle is honest. You want one payment, one person, and the whole thing handled from Lagos to landed. That is a reasonable thing to want, and it is exactly why the bundled "job plus certificate plus visa, one price" pitch spreads so well.

Here is the structural problem, and it has nothing to do with whether the man is nice. You can verify a person on a register. You can verify a company on the sponsor file. You cannot verify the middle of a bundle, because the middle is a private arrangement between people you will never meet, and it is the part where your money sits. When the answer to "which company is sponsoring me, and what is its licence number" is "leave that side to us," you have found the part that was designed not to be checked.

There is also a ledger nobody shows you. A sponsor licence can be revoked. Where a licence goes, the worker's permission to stay goes with it, and the person left holding that outcome is you, in a country where you now have no job and no status. The pitch is sold on the good case. You should price the bad one.

The messages to send tonight

Copy these. Send them as they are. Fill the brackets.

Good afternoon. Before we go further, please send me your licence or registration number so I can confirm it on the official register.

Please send me the full registered name of the company sponsoring me, and the certificate of sponsorship number once it is assigned.

Which official government page describes this route? I would like to read it myself.

Thank you. I will confirm on the register and come back to you by [DAY]. I am not sending any money before that.

A real professional answers all four in writing without irritation, because he answers them every week. The reply you get is itself the test. Watch for these three answers, because each one is a result:

• A voice note instead of a number.
• Irritation, or "do you not trust me."
• "The slots are closing today, pay now."

Emeka's four minutes

Emeka, 31, in Warri, is quoted a full package for a Canadian work route. The office is real, the man is calm, and there is a framed certificate on the wall.

He asks for the College licence number. He gets a photograph of the office instead. That is one minute.

He searches the College register by company name. Nothing. He tries the personal name he was given. Nothing. That is three minutes.

He asks which official page describes the programme. He gets a voice note about how many people they have sent out. That is four minutes.

Emeka does not argue. He does not accuse anybody of anything. He says he will confirm and come back, and then he does not come back. Four minutes of his evening against the money he was about to send, and the strongest part is that he never had to be rude to anybody.

Now notice what he did not do. He did not ask his friends in a group chat whether the man is genuine. Other people's opinions are not a register.

If you have already paid

First, the shame is not yours. These operations are professionally built to be believed, and the fact that you believed one says nothing about your intelligence. Now, the order of moves, because the order matters.

1. Write to your bank, in writing, at the branch where the transfer happened. Not a phone call, not a walk-in complaint you do not keep a copy of. The Central Bank of Nigeria's own process says that if you have a complaint against your bank you must first report it at the bank or branch where the issue originated.
2. Give it two weeks, and keep your evidence. The CBN gives banks two weeks to resolve a complaint under the ATM Help Desk circular, and thirty days for matters such as excess charges and loans.
3. Escalate to the Consumer Protection Department if the bank fails. The CBN states that if your bank does not engage and resolve the complaint within that window, you have the right to escalate to the Consumer Protection Department. Your letter should carry your name, address, phone number and email, the name of the financial institution, your banking details (never your PIN or password), the history and date of the disputed transaction, the amount claimed, supporting documents, and proof that you lodged the complaint with your bank first. The department is reachable by email at cpd@cbn.gov.ng and by letter to the Director, Consumer Protection Department, Central Business District, Abuja, which can be submitted at the CBN head office or any branch.

Source: CBN, complaints management and CBN, how to lodge a complaint.

If the story involved a UK employer or a UK adviser, the Home Office takes reports about illegal immigration activity online or on 0300 123 7000, and you do not have to give your name and address (gov.uk). If it involved Canada, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre takes reports online at reportcyberandfraud.canada.ca and on 1-888-495-8501, Monday to Friday, 10am to 4:45pm Eastern time (Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre).

Getting money back is never certain and nobody honest will tell you otherwise. But a complaint that is written, dated and escalated in the right order is a different thing from a WhatsApp argument, and it is the only version that has ever worked.

Questions people actually asked

"He said we should continue the conversation privately. Is that a problem?" Moving off a public thread is not proof of anything by itself, plenty of honest people do it. What matters is what survives the move. If the licence number, the registered company name and the official page link do not come with him into that private chat, the privacy was the point. Ask the four questions there and watch what happens.

"My partner did her UK biometrics and they did not keep her passport. Is that normal now?" The UK has moved to a digital immigration status. The government's own page states that eVisas have replaced physical immigration documents, that you need a UKVI account to access your eVisa, and that you do not need to pay to set up that account or to access it. If anybody offers to "release" or "activate" a status for a fee, that fee does not exist (gov.uk).

"Somebody said they were exempted from all fees including service charges. Which fees are real?" Fees are published, per route, on the official page for that route, and that page is the only fee list that exists. Two specific ones people get charged for wrongly: the UKVI account and eVisa access are free, and a UK sponsor may have its licence revoked for asking the sponsored worker to pay the fee or costs linked to the sponsor's own licence application. If a fee is not on the official page, ask which page it is on. There is always an answer, or there is a problem.

Who this page does not help

This page tells you how to check a person, a company and a document. It cannot tell you whether a route is right for you, and it cannot tell you that a properly licensed adviser is also a good one. A licence is a floor, not a recommendation.

It also does not help if you have decided in advance. If you are reading this hoping for permission to send the money to somebody who has already failed three of these checks, no page can do that for you, and the honest answer is the one you already know.

And if the real problem is that you cannot afford the legitimate route yet, checking harder will not fix that. That is a twelve month money and profile plan, not a verification problem, and it is a completely respectable place to be standing.

What quietly goes wrong

• Checking after paying instead of before.
• Accepting a screenshot of a register instead of searching it yourself, on a register that is republished most working days.
• Believing a real office means a real licence. Rent is cheap; regulation is not.
• Searching a trading name when the register holds the registered name.
• Treating a paper certificate of sponsorship as real when the real one is an electronic record with a number.
• Assuming that because it worked for a cousin two years ago, the same route is open or safe now.
• Arguing. You are not trying to win the conversation. You are trying to keep your money.

One thing to do now

Open the register for whoever you are currently talking to, and search the name tonight. Not tomorrow, not after the next call. Before the next payment.

Naira figures on this page were converted at the 18 August 2026 rate (£1 = ₦1,844, C$1 = ₦982).