You found a business for sale — a café in Valencia, a workshop outside Porto, a guesthouse listing with beautiful photos. Before you write to anyone, there are checks you can run yourself, today, in about twenty minutes. They cost nothing, they need no account anywhere, and they are the same first moves a professional makes.
One thing this note will not do is tell you whether a listing is genuine. It cannot — and neither can any tool, checklist or page that claims to. This is not a pass/fail process: completing every check below clears nothing, and a non-answer is a reason to pause, not a finding. What the checks actually produce is smaller and more useful — for each one, a question that the seller should be able to answer. This article does not determine whether any listing, seller, broker, company or payment request is genuine or fraudulent.
Start with the question that unlocks everything else
Which legal entity — or self-employed person — operates this business, and what is its tax ID? In Spain that is the NIF; in Portugal, the NIPC. Without it, every register in both countries is unusable: there is nothing to search for. A trade name — the sign over the door — is not enough, because the register holds the legal name, and companies with similar names are common.
Sellers often keep this out of a public listing so staff and landlords don't learn of the sale — an ordinary, legitimate reason. It is not a reason to withhold it from a serious buyer who asks. If the listing doesn't name the operator, this becomes your first written question. A straight answer unlocks every check below; an evasive one is not proof of anything — but treat any request for money made before the operator is named as a reason to pause and ask again, in writing.
Check 1 — put the photos through a reverse image search
Save the two or three most distinctive photos — the storefront, the most recognisable interior shot — and put each into Google Lens (click the camera icon, upload the image). You are looking for the same photos on a listing in another city or country, on a stock-photo site, or on the website of a business with a different name.
What a hit means: a question — "why do these photos exist somewhere else?" — that deserves an answer. Photos are sometimes reused innocently: a franchise template, an old listing for the same premises, a broker's stock shot. What no hit means: only that this search found nothing. Original photos show only that someone photographed a room — not who owns the business, and not that it is for sale. Either way, this check produces a question for the seller; it does not clear or accuse the listing.
Check 2 — look at the address before anyone shows it to you
If the listing gives a street address, open it on Google Maps and switch to Street View. Does the storefront match the photos? Is there a business of this kind at this address at all — or a home, a vacant unit, a different trade? Check the capture date in the corner: Street View can be years old, so a mismatch may be an old image — or may not. Either way it is now the seller's question to answer. (Note that opening a maps link sends the address to Google — ordinary, but worth knowing.)
For Spain, you can also look the premises up on the Catastro map — the cadastral record of what officially exists at that address (the Basque provinces and Navarre keep separate cadastral systems). The Catastro locates the premises; it says nothing about the business, the lease, or who may sell. In Madrid, the city publishes an open dataset of premises and their recorded activity — the censo de locales — useful as an address-and-activity clue, not as proof of a licence.
If the address is "confidential", that too is common — brokers protect addresses for real reasons — and it means none of the physical checks can run yet. If a deposit is requested before the premises can even be identified, treat that payment request as not yet documented: the address moves to the top of your written questions. A Street View match or mismatch, likewise, produces a question for the seller; it does not clear or accuse the listing.
Check 3 — the registers, with both hands on the wheel
This is the check people most want, and the one most often misread — in both directions. So before the links, the two rules:
Finding the company does NOT mean the listing is genuine. People running fabricated listings borrow the names of real, registered companies; the person you are emailing may have no connection to the company on the listing; and a company can be real while the premises, licence or lease in the advert have nothing to do with it.
Not finding it does NOT mean the listing is a scam. Many entirely legitimate small businesses are run by sole traders who appear in no company register; a Spanish traspaso is often just a lease assignment with no company behind it; registers lag; and free searches miss spelling variants and accents. A search result is not a certificate — of anything.
Spain. Company acts — incorporations, administrator appointments, dissolutions — are published in the daily BORME bulletin. The BOE also offers a search over BORME announcements (a separate section of notices); neither is a substitute for a current extract from the Registro Mercantil, which is the paid, authoritative record. A practical free first pass is a web search of the exact legal name together with site:boe.es. Separately, the public insolvency register at publicidadconcursal.es can be searched by name — remembering that absence there is absence from that register, not absence of financial trouble.
Portugal. Company acts that must be published — incorporations, dissolutions, insolvency decisions among them — are free to search at publicacoes.mj.pt. A publication search can lag or miss acts; the current registered record is the company's certidão permanente, a paid official extract from registo.justica.gov.pt — and even that shows what is registered, not whether this deal is sound. In a real negotiation there is a shortcut: ask whether the seller will provide a current access code to their own certidão; the request itself is informative.
Search discipline, whichever country: exact legal name first, then variants — with and without "S.L." or "Lda", with and without accents. Write down the date you searched and the exact queries. If a result matters later, "no match for this name in this source on this date, searched this way" is the honest formula — nothing stronger.
Then the harder question: is the person you are talking to connected to the company at all? Administrator appointments are among the published acts, but a quick search can lag or miss them. If the seller's name is nowhere you can see, ask in what capacity they are selling — owner of the shares, spouse, attorney, broker with a written mandate? A legitimate answer exists. Get it in writing.
Check 4 — read the contact and payment pattern
No single signal here proves anything, in either direction. A personal Gmail is how thousands of real bar owners correspond; WhatsApp-only is normal for a sole trader. What matters is what the channel lets you collect: your goal in the first exchanges is written evidence that ties four things together — the person you are talking to, the operating company, the premises, and whoever would receive any payment.
A few situations earn a specific, polite, written response — and the response, not the situation, is the real test:
- A deposit before a viewing or documents. The legitimate sequence is identity → premises → documents → then money, refundable or conditional, in writing, to a traceable account in the operating party's name. The answer: "happy to reserve — after the viewing, in writing, refundable."
- Urgency — another buyer this afternoon, a discount expiring Monday. Real deadlines exist; but a seller unwilling to answer basic written questions before money changes hands is leaving you with a documentation problem, whatever the calendar says.
- The seller is abroad and everything is remote. Owners do sell from abroad — through a lawyer or attorney-in-fact, verifiable on paper. Ask who, physically in the country, can open the door and sign.
- A video call from inside the premises is deflected. It is the cheapest proof of physical presence there is, which is exactly why the second deflection is informative.
- Payment steered to a personal account, a transfer service or cryptocurrency. Of everything on this list, this is the least compatible with a documented business purchase, because it concerns the point where money becomes unrecoverable. Decline in writing and ask for payment terms that tie, on paper, to the seller, the company and the premises. Keep the response in your file — and do not read more into it than the documents support.
- A price far below every comparable, wrapped in an emotional story. Real distress sales exist. The story's job in a fraud is to make you feel lucky instead of curious. A genuinely distressed seller accepts checks; the price exempts the listing from none of them.
The five questions to put in writing
- Which legal entity or self-employed person operates this business, and what is its NIF / NIPC?
- What is the exact address of the premises?
- In what capacity are you selling — owner, shareholder, attorney, mandated broker?
- Can we do a short video call from inside the premises, during opening hours?
- Who — which named account, in whose name — would receive any payment, and on what written terms?
Every one of these costs a genuine seller nothing. What you learn is rarely in the answers themselves — it is in which ones come back straight, and which come back sideways.
One more rule, for your own protection: keep what you find to yourself and your advisers. These checks produce questions, not findings — do not publish accusations about named people or businesses on forums or reviews on the strength of them. A search result that felt damning at midnight is, in the morning, still just a search result.
What none of this can establish
Everything above uses the free public layer, and some questions live beyond it no matter how carefully you search: whether the company, the premises, the licence and the lease all belong to the same story — the identity work where most surprises live; the court and insolvency record read correctly — knowing which absence means "nothing there" and which means "wrong register"; the debts that in Spain and Portugal can follow a business activity to its next holder rather than staying with a company (whose unpaid tax can follow a Spanish sale →); and who held the business before this seller. These checks do not read the underlying record, the authority chain, or the lease and licence position — a file that looks clean after them is not a cleared file. That layer is paid work — mine or someone else's — and no twenty-minute check replaces it.
Want this as a working plan instead of an article? The free listing self-check asks you a few questions about your specific listing and assembles these checks into an ordered plan with the links ready — in your browser, no email required, and no verdict on any listing.
Build my check plan →Basis: the public sources linked in the text, each retrieved and working on 10 July 2026 — the BORME daily bulletins and the Registro Público Concursal and Catastro for Spain, publicacoes.mj.pt and the certidão permanente service for Portugal. General information about how to use public sources, not legal advice and not due diligence; what any result means for a specific transaction is a question for a lawyer in the country of the business. Not a statement about any listing, seller or business.