How to check a suspected scam company

1. Separate two things first: the company name being used, and the party you are actually dealing with. The commonest fraud uses a genuine company’s name.
2. Check that the entity exists and that its activity is licensed. Two other pages in this guide say how.
3. If what is offered is investment, lending, pawnbroking or insurance, check whether the party is licensed by OJK and whether its name appears in the register of illegal operations that Satgas PASTI publishes on OJK’s Investor Alert Portal.
4. Match the phone number and the bank account given against the company’s name. A personal account taking payment for a company is the signal that turns up most often.
5. If money has already gone, preserve the evidence first — the messages, the transfer receipts and the documents — and then report it.

• Listed on the Investor Alert Portal: the authority has found that the entity carries on financial services without a licence. A listing always cites the press release or decision behind it, and that is what you read.
• Not listed: the register holds what has been examined and published, so not listed means not yet listed. Anything new is always absent from it.
• A name close to a licensed institution’s but not identical: this is a pattern the authority publishes again and again. Match it down to the legal form and the licence number.
• The entity exists but the activity is unlicensed: what is legitimate is the company, not what it is offering. This is the result most often read as “official”.

• This page says of nobody that they committed fraud. Fraud is a legal conclusion, and a court is what reaches it.
• A register of illegal operations is the authority’s finding on the date it was published, not a judgement about today; an entity can leave the list once it is licensed.
• A company that is registered, licensed and on no list at all can still fail to pay. Checking legality is not checking solvency.
• And an unlicensed activity is not necessarily fraud — but inside it you are covered by no authority’s supervision.

Losses from fraud are reported to the police; complaints about financial services go to OJK; a dispute with a legitimate business goes to the consumer dispute body or to court. Collect the evidence before you break contact: once the number, the account or the app is gone, what is left is what you kept.

Where an entity is listed on OJK’s Investor Alert Portal and matches one company in our corpus, that profile shows the listing together with the press-release reference — as OJK’s finding, never as a judgement of ours. Phone numbers Satgas PASTI published are shown the same way on the page for that number, which is what to use when a number is all you have.

• Law 8/1999 on Consumer Protection
• Law 11/2008 on Electronic Information and Transactions, as last amended by Law 1/2024
• Law 4/2023 on the Development and Strengthening of the Financial Sector, for OJK’s authority over financial services
• Law 1/2023, the Criminal Code, in force since 2 January 2026

A summary of the rules in force, not legal advice. Rules and thresholds change — check with the relevant authority before you register.

PT, CV, cooperative, foundation and the rest: how they differ and what it means for the owner.