Scammers don’t write bad emails any more. The modern fake broker has a polished website, a licence number that looks right, and a WhatsApp group of “other happy clients” ready to vouch. Here are the five one-minute checks that catch nearly every fraudulent firm before it costs you a cent.

1 · Search the regulator’s public register — by number, not by name

Every real broker in Europe has a licence number on a national regulator’s register. Look up the number on the regulator’s site (not the firm’s) and check that the licence holder’s legal name matches exactly. A hair’s-breadth difference in spelling or a totally different name means the firm is either misrepresenting a licence that belongs to someone else, or has cloned a real firm’s identity.

2 · Check how old the domain is

A WHOIS lookup takes ten seconds. A firm that claims a decade of history and whose website was registered six weeks ago is lying about one of the two.

3 · Look at who you’d be paying

Before any deposit, see the beneficiary name on the payment page. If it doesn’t match the firm — say, a payment processor in a third country, or a personal account with a similar-looking name — walk away.

4 · Reverse-search the team photos

Fake firms love a stock-photo “board of directors”. A reverse image search on each headshot tells you quickly whether the “team” is actually a stock pack from the Czech Republic.

5 · Say “no” and watch the pressure

Reply to the pitch with a polite “I’d like to think about it for two weeks.” A real firm will say that’s fine. A scam will raise the pressure: a limited window, a bonus that expires, a VIP tier you’re about to lose. That reaction is the clearest signal of the lot.

If any of these turns up a red flag, don’t argue with yourself — ask for a Firmenprüfung before moving a cent.

Investment advice online is loud. Emergency-fund advice is quiet, boring and usually gets skipped. That’s backwards — because almost all the people we meet who got hurt by an investment were hurt because they had to pull it out at a bad moment to cover a surprise.

What counts as an emergency cushion?

Enough plain cash, in an account you can reach today, to cover the things that would otherwise force you to sell investments at the wrong time. Three categories of shock, roughly:

• Income shocks — a lost job, a long illness, a client who stops paying.
• Household shocks — a car that fails inspection, a boiler that dies in January, a vet bill nobody saw coming.
• Family shocks — a parent who suddenly needs help, a child who moves home.

How big?

The rule of thumb is three to six months of outgoings. We prefer to size by actual outgoings because it tells you something useful — three months of what you actually spend, not three months of what you earn, and not a round figure out of a magazine.

Sit down with the last three bank statements, add up the essentials (rent, utilities, food, transport, insurance, minimum debt payments), and multiply by three. That’s the minimum. Six months is safer if your income is irregular, your household is sole-earner, or you’d need time to find comparable work.

Where to keep it

Instant-access savings in a bank covered by deposit protection in your own country. Not an investment account, not a crypto wallet, not “somewhere earning a bit more”. The whole point is that it’s there instantly, without a market dip costing you the right to spend it.

Only then: investing

Once the cushion is in place, investing becomes psychologically different. You can leave the money alone through a bad month, because the mortgage isn’t riding on a share price. That’s where returns actually come from — time in, not stress-selling.