Do they have any proof they didn't make themselves?

A screenshot of a Stripe dashboard. A wall of five-star testimonials. A big monthly figure under a video. Every one of those was produced by the seller, on the seller's own device, and chosen by the seller from whatever made the best impression. That is not proof. It is a claim with good production values.

Real proof is the evidence a seller does not control. Filed company accounts. References you pick and phone yourself. Reviews on a platform the seller cannot edit. And a figure that shows what happened to everyone who bought, not just the one person in the testimonial. If everything a seller offers traces back to their own camera roll, you have not seen proof of anything yet. You have seen a claim, dressed well.

Here is how to tell the two apart before your money leaves your account.

A screenshot is the cheapest thing on the internet to fake#

Open any web page, right click, choose inspect, and you can change the number on the screen in about ten seconds. There are services that sell template bank statements. A dashboard photo carries no record of where it came from or whether it is real. So the instinct to treat a specific figure as a verified figure is exactly the instinct being used against you.

There is a reason this works on careful people. When a claim is hard to check, we lean on signals of credibility instead of on the claim itself, and those signals quietly bend how we read the evidence. The psychologists Shelly Chaiken and Durairaj Maheswaran showed in 1994 that when a message is ambiguous and the stakes feel high, source credibility does not just sit alongside our reasoning, it biases the direction of that reasoning. The same dynamic plausibly applies to a sales page: when you cannot verify whether the income screenshot is real, the confident voice, the nice car and the follower count change how you judge the screenshot, not just whether you bother to. The production values do the persuading so the proof never has to.

A live screen share is a small step up and still soft. Revenue is not profit. A good day is not a month. Refunds pending inflate the figure. A single window can be cherry picked. A test account can be staged. "Watch me log in" answers a different question from "show me what most of your students earned."

The proof ladder#

Sort what a seller offers into these five rungs. Most grift lives on the bottom two. An honest operator can reach the top two and usually will if you ask in writing.

• Rung zero, worthless, fully seller-controlled. Dashboard and bank screenshots, testimonial walls, income figures inside the sales video. Made by them, chosen by them, unfalsifiable.
• Rung one, slightly better, still gameable. A live dashboard share. Watch for gross versus net, refunds pending, one good day stretched into a monthly claim.
• Rung two, third party but weak. Reviews on a neutral platform such as Trustpilot or Google, but only if there is real volume, recent dates, and no sign the reviews were incentivised.
• Rung three, independently verifiable. Filed accounts at the public company register. A VAT registration. Audited figures. References you choose and contact yourself. A prior track record you can confirm. Credentials checked against the body that issued them.
• Rung four, the gold, rarely offered. A figure showing the spread of results across everyone who bought, including the people who earned nothing and the people who dropped out. The denominator.

That last rung matters most, because the entire trick is to show you the winner and hide the field. The closest any regulator has come to forcing those numbers into the open is in the related world of multi-level marketing, where some firms do publish income figures. When the United States Federal Trade Commission reviewed seventy of those disclosures, it found they routinely leave out the people who made nothing and lead with a handful of top earners. Coaching and course sellers are under no obligation to publish anything of the kind, so for them the field stays by default. The result you saw in the advert may be real and still be one buyer in a thousand.

Three different claims, hiding inside one screenshot#

Sellers collapse three separate claims into a single image and hope you will not pull them apart. Pull them apart.

1. The seller is rich. Maybe. Filed accounts could show it.
2. The method made them rich. A different claim. The money may come from selling the course, not from doing the thing the course teaches.
3. The method will work for you. Different again. That needs the spread of student outcomes, not the founder's bank balance.

Proof of a bank balance is not proof of a method, and proof of a method is not proof it works for you. A seller who shows you one and talks as if they have shown you all three is the seller to slow down with.

The one line that does the work#

Put this to any seller, in writing, and keep the reply:

Everything you have shown me so far is something you produced yourself. What can you show me that you did not make, that I can check on my own?

A confident, honest operator has answers. Filed accounts. Three former clients in a similar position to you, named, who agreed to take your call. A neutral review profile. A figure for typical results. A seller who treats that question as an insult, or who never quite answers it, has told you something. Under the United Kingdom's advertising rules, anyone making an earnings claim is already expected to hold evidence for it before they ever publish it, and that evidence must reflect what a normal buyer is likely to achieve, not the best week of the best performer. You are only asking to see what they are already supposed to have. If you would rather send the full thing, there is a copy-and-send version of this, next to a refund letter for when it goes wrong, on letters you can send.

The limit, because every check has one#

A clean public record does not make a seller honest, and a missing one does not make a seller a fraud. Plenty of legitimate small operators are sole traders with no company filings, or sit behind a holding company, or trade from another country. No public record is a question to ask, not a verdict to reach. Filed revenue is not profit, and revenue from selling courses is not the same as revenue from the method being taught. Reviews can be bought. Proof reduces your uncertainty. It does not erase it.

The point is not to find a single perfect document. It is to notice when a seller can only ever offer you things they made themselves, and to treat that as the answer it is.

What an honest seller looks like#

This is the reassuring half, and it is true. A good operator can say: here is what I did before I taught this, and you can verify it. Here are three clients you can ring. Here is our review profile on a platform I do not control. Here is roughly what most people who buy this actually get, including the ones it does not work for. Here is our refund policy, in writing, before you pay.

If a seller passes that, you have not just avoided a loss. You have found someone worth working with. The checks on this site are built so that the good operators pass them easily and the grifters cannot. That is the whole idea. To see every check run over one seller from start to finish, read a worked example.