How we verify
We want you to be able to trust what you read on fraud.ca — and to understand what we do and don’t check.
Reviewers
- Every reviewer confirms their email address by clicking a sign-in link we send. That’s what the Verified email label on a review means.
- It doesn’t prove the person was a customer. We ask every reviewer to confirm the review is their own honest experience, that they don’t work for the business or a competitor, and that they weren’t paid or rewarded for it. Our moderation also looks for obvious signs of fake reviews — but we don’t check receipts or other proof of purchase.
- One review per account per business. People can generally edit their review, but not post a second one.
- Limits and bot protection. A bot check on sign-in and daily posting limits make it harder to flood a business with fake reviews.
Every review and post is checked
Before a review, post or business response appears, it’s checked like this:
- Rules check for things like links, email addresses and repeated discussion posts.
- An AI model (currently Claude, made by Anthropic) checks the text using rules based on our guidelines. It can publish it, send it back with specific advice (for example, to describe what happened instead of calling someone a criminal), reject spam and abuse, or hold it for a person.
- A human moderator handles content the automatic checks hold for review, reports those checks can’t settle, and appeals.
We don’t send account email addresses to the AI. Anyone can ask for a person to review a decision about their content.
Business owners
A business can claim its page by proving its connection: an email link to an address at the business’s own website domain, a code placed on its website or DNS, or documents checked by a person. Verified owners can respond to reviews, post with a Business label and update contact details and hours. They can’t edit, hide or remove reviews. We can remove access if a claim turns out to be false.
Ratings
A business’s rating is the plain average of its published reviews. We don’t weight, adjust or hide reviews based on whether a business pays us — no business can pay to change its rating or remove a review. Discussion posts don’t affect the rating.
Business information
| What you see | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Name, address, phone, website, category | Usually Overture Maps Foundation open data, which combines sources such as Meta, Microsoft and Foursquare; some details may come from other sources, including the business itself |
| Public record: status, corporation number, business number, registered office, annual filing status | Corporations Canada, the federal corporations registry |
| “Possibly the same business” links | Automatic, from similar names and locations; not verified |
| Hours, service area, languages | Mainly the business, once it claims its page |
- Public-record boxes show their source and the date we retrieved it, with a link to the official record where available.
- We attach a corporation’s registry record to a storefront only when their names match (ignoring accents, punctuation and endings like Inc.) and they share a postal code (or a city where the name is unique). Each page says how a match was made. When we’re not sure, we don’t combine their records — so some businesses appear twice, once as a storefront and once as a registered corporation.
- Registry information can lag or contain errors. Check the official record before relying on it for an important decision.
What we don’t do
We’re a review community, not an investigator, a credit agency or the police. We don’t verify every statement in every review, guarantee that business information is current, or tell you whether a business is safe to deal with. We give you the information — reviews, discussion and public records — so you can decide.
Spotted a mistake? Email support@fraud.ca or see how to report content.