Verifyd helps you check messages before you act on them.
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Verifyd helps you check messages before you act on them.
Scams in South Africa cost real people real money. Every day, millions
of fake SMS messages, emails, and WhatsApp messages pretend to be your
bank, your courier, or SARS. They're designed to look legitimate. They
want you to click, call, or pay before you have time to think.
Verifyd gives you a moment to think.
Paste a suspicious message into Verifyd and we'll check it against
known scam patterns, verify sender details, look for hidden links, and
use AI to spot the patterns scammers use. You get a clear answer in
seconds: probably safe, worth being cautious, or likely a scam. Every
verdict comes with plain-language reasoning. We don't just say "this
is suspicious," we explain why.
assume too much.
Most security tools are built for businesses or for people who already
know what they're doing. They use technical language. They warn about
"potential phishing attempts" and "suspicious URLs." They assume you'll
figure out what to do with that information.
Most people don't.
The people losing money to scams aren't careless. They're busy. A SMS
arrives saying their FNB account is locked. They're in a meeting, they
tap the link, they enter their password. By the time they realise
something's wrong, the money's gone.
We built Verifyd for that moment. The 30 seconds between receiving a
suspicious message and acting on it. A simple tool you can paste
into, get a clear answer from, and trust to tell you the truth,
even when the truth is "we're not sure."
we built around.
The scams that target South Africans are specific: bank impersonations, SARS refunds, courier redelivery fees, fake SASSA messages. International security tools don't recognise these patterns. We do, because they're all we focus on.
You don't need to understand cryptography or domain reputation scoring to use Verifyd. We explain every verdict in language anyone can read: "This message claims to be from Capitec, but the sender isn't a verified Capitec number" or "This URL leads to a known phishing site."
Your messages don't live on our servers. We hash the content to detect scams reported by other users, but we can't read your actual messages back. Your check history stays on your phone.
Read more on our Security page
You don't sign up. You don't give us your email or your phone number. Download the app and start checking messages. We don't have your data because we never asked for it.
No ads, no data sale. We're not selling your attention to
advertisers, and we're not selling your data to anyone. When Verifyd
eventually becomes a paid product, you'll pay us directly, the way
buying software used to work.
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Four kinds of checks, for every message.
We combine four kinds of checks for every message. The result: a verdict
in seconds, with reasoning you can understand and act on.
01
Scammers reuse phrases, structures, and urgency tactics. We match incoming messages against patterns we've identified across thousands of reported scams.
02
Banks have specific sender IDs. Couriers have known numbers. We check whether the sender of a message matches what they're claiming to be.
03
Many scams use deceptive URLs: links that look like legitimate sites but redirect elsewhere. We expand shortened URLs and check destination domains against known phishing lists.
04
Patterns we haven't seen before still share characteristics with known scams. We use AI to recognise those characteristics and flag messages that look suspicious even when they don't match a specific pattern.
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One report protects everyone.
When you confirm something is a scam, you can report it to the Verifyd
community database. Every report makes Verifyd better at catching that
scam for everyone else.
Reports are anonymous. We don't link them to your name, your phone
number, or your email. We just keep the message content (so other users
get matched against it) and an anonymous identifier that lets us
prevent abuse.
This is the only situation where Verifyd stores readable
message content. We do it because the whole point of reporting
is to help others.
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A small team
in Cape Town.
Verifyd is built by a small team in Cape Town, South Africa. We started
this project because we kept seeing people we know (friends, family,
colleagues) almost falling for scams. The tools available either
assumed too much, cost too much, or didn't understand the specific
scams targeting us.
So we built something different.
We're not a security company trying to sell you a suite of products.
We're not collecting data to monetise. We're trying to be genuinely
useful for one important thing: helping South Africans avoid scams.
If we do that well, that's enough.
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We'd love to hear from you.
Suggestion, bug report, or just want to say hello, reach us at
or via our contact page.
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