- How does Alliance Virtual Offices protect against fake businesses?
- How does this help us attract legitimate businesses and maintain their reputation?
- Helping your legitimate business stand out
Q: How can you make sure you’re dealing with a legitimate business?
A: The first step you should take to make sure you’re dealing with a legitimate business is to explore the website. If there are misspellings, obviously copied and pasted sections, or other red flags, that’s a good sign that something’s up. You can also find the company’s Employer Identification Number (EIN) and look the business up that way.
With the recent influx of virtual businesses and work-from-home initiatives, we’ve seen countless individuals leave traditional jobs in the hopes of finding employment that encourages a healthy work-life balance.
Unfortunately, this transition has some fairly serious negative reverberations as well.
In 2021, internet fraud schemes rose by a staggering 10%, with a number of these schemes involving fake businesses.
With fraudsters targeting business owners through the use of a scam business, it can be difficult to know whether or not you’re dealing with a potential client or someone who hopes to take your money.
Additionally, the introduction of virtual offices, especially from shadier providers, has provided an opportunity for scammers to look even more convincing.
So, what can you do to protect your legitimate business? How can you ensure you aren’t going to fall victim to these business-to-business schemes, or worse, choose a virtual office that connects you to other individuals running scams?
In this article, we’ll go over how Alliance Virtual Offices protects its customers and keeps fake businesses away, what this means for your business’s reputation, and how this helps you feel safe and build your community.
- How does Alliance Virtual Offices protect against fake businesses?
- How does this help us attract legitimate businesses and maintain their reputation?
- How this helps you feel safe and build your community
- Helping your legitimate business stand out
How Does Alliance Keep Scammers and Fake Businesses Away?
In a landscape rife with scams, it’s important for us to properly vet all of our customers. There’s nothing worse for the reputation of our business as well as the businesses of our customers than an individual using one of our virtual offices for nefarious reasons.
Before we begin, let’s take a look at how you can distinguish a legitimate business from a scam business.
Legitimate Business – Doing Your Due Diligence
Just as it sounds, businesses that operate within the clearly defined confines of the law are perfect examples of legitimate business. Meaning any legally operating business that isn’t breaking the law to make money.
A legitimate business will have an Employer Identification Number or EIN, that can be used to verify legitimacy.
Finding this EIN can be tricky, but here are a few tips that can help you determine whether or not you’re dealing with a legitimate business.
Contact the company
Asking the company directly about their EIN can eliminate the headache of searching for information. However, if you’re in a hurry and trying to do research at the moment, contacting the company might take too much time.
Use the SEC EDGAR database
EDGAR, or Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval is an online database that indexes all of the forms that businesses are required by law to file. You can search for keywords, business names, the stock ticker (if applicable), or even the registrant’s name.
Contact Credit Bureaus
If the previous methods haven’t worked, you can always pay a small fee for a credit report of a particular business. Legitimate business loans and other information will be included, but you should double-check with the bureau you’re dealing with to ensure that the EIN is included in the report beforehand.
Scam Business – What to watch out for
A scam business is a “business” that doesn’t operate within the confines of the law. These businesses, if you could even call them businesses, won’t have filed the proper forms and will be difficult to research online.
Where a legitimate business intends on making money with various products or services, a scam business intends on taking money through dishonest or illegal means.
For your sake, we’ve listed some of the most common small business scams that you may encounter as an established entrepreneur.
Social Engineering Scams
Social engineering occurs when an individual convinces your business that they are a legitimate business hoping to transact with you. Scammers will attempt to socially engineer individuals to get them to divulge sensitive information or make security mistakes that could result in the loss of funds.
Opening Lines of Credit with No Intention To Repay
This scheme involves opening lines of credit with a scam business that the scammer never intends to pay off. In this situation, the scammer will make numerous purchases from as many companies as possible before disappearing.
Payment Fraud
Payment fraud is a bit of a combination of both of the above. Payment fraud happens when nefarious individuals gain access to an individual or business’s private information, then use that information to make frivolous purchases.
Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware is a kind of malicious software designed to lock people out of their computers. After the ransomware has infected the computer, there will be a ransom that has to be paid for the computer to return to functionality.
Legitimate business expenses can reflect your business’s attempts to prevent some of these online scams. Different antivirus or anti-ransomware applications can be written off after being used to protect your business.
Read more: Ransomware: A Legitimate Illegitimate Business
Legitimate business ideas suffer from these ubiquitous scams. When consumers are cautious, and rightfully so, they become far less willing to take a risk on new ideas or concepts that they don’t recognize.
To combat this sentiment, you need to be surrounded by other legitimate businesses.
Alliance Virtual Offices ensures that all of our clients are working with a legitimate business.
With more and more Americans calling on the government to protect them from these rampant online scams, it’s paramount for Alliance to give anyone with a legitimate business a safe community to operate within.
Below, we’ve listed two of the steps we take to vet our customers and a brief description of the actionable ways we verify this information: Address Verification and Document Verification.
Address Verification
Our first line of defense. We make any individual using our virtual offices provide us with an address to prove that they are a legitimate business.
Doing so prevents fraudsters from using our virtual offices to set up a scam business under a fake identity.
Because they must have a legitimate mailing address when they’re registering, they’re unable to simply make up information or create shell corps.
Scammers want to provide the least amount of information that they can get away with providing.
By requiring address verification, we’re ensuring that we’re dealing with real businesses with legitimate mailing addresses.
Document Verification
Second, we send physical documents to all of our clients that have signed up. This ensures that no one with a fake address can complete the onboarding process.
If a scam business tries to set up a virtual office with fake information, they won’t be able to sign the physical documents, meaning they won’t get the virtual office.
By having our customers provide a legitimate address, and then making them prove that that address is indeed legitimate, we’re making it nearly impossible for anyone to use our offices for nefarious reasons.
In addition to verifying both the address and personal information in the document, we take the time to check and make sure that people are providing accurate information.
All too often, virtual office providers are focused more on making the sale than on protecting their current customers.
At Alliance, we take the time to double-check this information.
As evidenced by our nearly 90% positive reviews on TrustPilot, we’re dedicated to outstanding service and support.
To effectively protect our customers and continue providing world-class service, a scam business using our virtual offices isn’t something we can allow.
What This Means for Your Business’s Reputation
Other virtual offices allow just about anyone to set up their business with them and by doing so, add an element of illegitimacy to their customers’ businesses.
If your virtual office provider doesn’t ask you for any pertinent information, then it only stands to reason that the other individuals registering through their service might not be honest about that information either.
For a scam business, a shoddily managed virtual office to use as an address is a haven for all sorts of schemes.
Being scammed is a terrible feeling. Below, we’ve explored the thought process your average consumer goes through after being scammed and the assumptions these consumers might make after falling victim to a scam business.
- The consumer purchases a fraudulent business
- In doing so, they quickly realize that they’ve been scammed
- In frustration and disbelief, the consumer will research the business that scammed them
- This research will often lead the consumer to the business’s website, and by extension, the business’s address
- When they connect the scam business to a virtual mailbox, they will often choose to avoid all businesses registered with virtual mailboxes
Now, we all know that not every business registered with a virtual mailbox is a scam business, just like not every traditional office houses a legitimate business.
That said, after you’ve been swindled out of hard-earned money, emotion can easily get the best of you.
So, to effectively protect your business against emotional consumers dealing with the fallout of a previous scam, what can you do?
You need to use a legitimate, peer-reviewed, and well-known virtual office provider.
If the provider you’re using is housing countless scam businesses and consumers everywhere are looking questionably at the provider, it’s a large asterisk next to your business’s name that will be difficult to remove.
With so many consumers on the lookout for these kinds of scams, it is paramount to your business’s success to share virtually no relations or associations with a scam business.
Read more: Americans lost $68 million to job scams this year – here’s what to look out for
Alliance’s virtual offices give you a legitimate local presence. In the same way that shady virtual address or virtual mailbox providers lend illegitimacy to the businesses that use them, our commercial spaces give your business the professional image it needs.
When potential customers search for your business, they’ll find images of a prestigious office location that instantly builds credibility and inspires confidence in your legitimacy.
This simple distinction makes a world of difference for curious consumers. With information so easily accessible, it’s paramount that you take the necessary precautions to avoid associating your legitimate business with anything that could even be interpreted as a scam.
What This Means for Your Business’s Safety and Community
Because Alliance Virtual Offices only allows legitimate businesses to join our centers, you can feel confident that your safety and security will be upheld.
Our business centers protect your home address so that scam businesses can’t find you.
With your home address out of the public domain, you won’t be subject to the constant stream of spam and scams that would hit your mailbox otherwise.
In the same vein, you avoid scam calls and never risk leaving your mail unattended in an area that scammers might have access to.
Additionally, we’ve compiled some actionable tips that you can use to ensure you avoid scam businesses and other bad actors.
NEVER click unknown links.
All too often, scammers will recreate links or emails that look incredibly convincing. Do not click on links from individuals that you don’t know, and always double-check to make sure the emails you’re receiving are coming from legitimate and known sources. Websites like Norton Safe Web can be used to verify the legitimacy of any questionable links.
Verify your clients
With the uptick in social engineering scams, you need to make sure that you’re dealing with an actual business and not an opportunistic scammer. Use the tips above to verify the EIN of the business and peruse the company’s website to make sure you aren’t falling victim to this kind of scheme.
Do not divulge personal information or matters of security over email
It can be tough to follow this guideline, but refusing to divulge matters of security or personal information over email can save you from several savvy schemers. If you’re in a position where you need to send your personal information to someone else, you just need to make sure that you’re speaking with the person you think you’re speaking with, and that that person is legitimate.
Be skeptical
With the presence of so many scams, it’s best for business owners to operate with skepticism and awareness. Most of these scams will have clear indicators that you can pick up on to avoid them. Simply being aware and remaining skeptical will put you in a better position than more than 60% of Americans.
Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
By cultivating a community of like-minded business owners and professionals, we further build your business’s legitimacy. Each center is filled with professional entrepreneurs, boosting the prestige of the center in a reciprocal fashion.
The legitimate business purpose is always to make money and expand. Alliance Virtual Offices allows you to save money while interacting with other established entrepreneurs, further extending your business’s reach.
Read more: What is a Good Profit Margin for a Small Business? Your Complete Guide
When you join, you gain the prestige of the center and borrow the prestige of all the other successful entrepreneurs who use Alliance.
Finally, the community of professional, like-minded entrepreneurs means you can surround yourself, both virtually and physically, with a positive community with plenty of networking potential.
Helping Your Legitimate Business Stand Out
Other virtual addresses invite scammers and fraudulent businesses, diminishing the legitimacy of any business that chooses to register with them.
Alliance Virtual Offices goes above and beyond to ensure the legitimacy of all our members.
This means your business maintains a professional image and that you are always secure.
Alliance’s insistence on providing the highest quality virtual offices requires us to vet our customers and carefully verify their information.
By paying such close attention to the businesses that use our services, Alliance ensures that scammers have no hope of procuring one of our virtual offices.
Further Reading:
Alliance Virtual Offices provides several virtual business solutions for established entrepreneurs.
Our virtual offices provide a line of defense against the various scams affecting business owners all over the country.
Through the use of a virtual office, legitimate business owners can use an address that, when searched, takes the consumer back to a professional and well-known address.
Rather than dealing with cheap virtual addresses tied to mailboxes, PO boxes, or even no address at all, Alliance makes a point to only use physical addresses that are professionally known and isolated from any kind of scams.
Our physical office space is safe and secure, and the community in our physical spaces is made up of other motivated entrepreneurs trying just as hard to expand their operations.
With overwhelmingly positive reviews on Trustpilot that far exceed the competition’s, Alliance Virtual Offices’ commitment to professionalism and security is proven.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an established entrepreneur or a new business owner hoping to effectively scale your operations, contact us to see how we can help you expand your operations today!
