⚠ PUBLIC ADVISORY · READ BEFORE PAYING ANY AI VENDOR

Spot the Scam

A free public-protection guide. Use this checklist on us. Use it on every AI vendor. Use it on every online service that asks for your money.

⚠ The pattern you must guard against

A bad actor builds a glossy landing page promising autonomous-AI demos. They charge $500-$5,000 per session. One thousand victims pay an average of $500 each. The scammer disappears with $500,000 of public money and the page goes dark. No demo was ever performed. Nothing was ever delivered. Nobody can find them. This pattern is replicable and the internet currently provides no structural defense against it.

We publish this guide because we use a paid-demo model ourselves, and we refuse to operate one without first arming the public to identify the difference between us and a copycat. The questions below work on any AI vendor, including AMARTIE. Apply them to us first.

The Eight-Point Checklist

Any vendor asking for money for an AI demo or build should pass all eight. If any one fails, do not pay them.

  1. Identifiable human or registered corporation. Real legal name, verifiable physical address (not a P.O. Box), phone number a human answers, business registration number. Test: search the registration number in the issuing jurisdiction's public registry. If no record, walk away.
  2. Verifiable client references. At least one real-named client whose business exists, can be Google-searched, and will take a phone call. Test: call the client directly.
  3. Public, on-chain (or bank-traceable) payment destination. Crypto wallet address published and verifiable on blockchain explorer. Card processor merchant name matches website. Test: paste the wallet into blockstream.info or etherscan.io.
  4. Cryptographic session receipt. Vendor commits in writing to providing a signed receipt at end of every demo, itemizing what was delivered, tokens consumed, milestones captured. Test: ask for a sample receipt before paying.
  5. Milestone-based or refundable charging. Pay-as-delivered milestones, or a clear public escrow refund policy. Test: read the refund policy. "All sales final" with no milestones is a major red flag.
  6. Live, unscripted demo capability. Vendor will run a 30-second live demo against a question YOU choose, before payment, on a video call. Test: ask. A real product can. A scam cannot.
  7. Public transparency ledger. Ongoing public counts of demos delivered, demos converted, and aggregate balance. Test: visit /transparency or equivalent. If it does not exist, that is itself information.
  8. Open-source or auditable methodology. Published architecture diagram and key safety logic. Full source need not be open but vendor should not be a complete black box.

✓ How AMARTIE passes the checklist

The Traceable-Entity Standard · industry proposal

We publicly advocate that all internet commerce above a low threshold (say $50) be required by payment processors to verify and expose the merchant's legal identity, registered address, business registration, and tax ID to the buyer as a routine part of the transaction. This is technically trivial — Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard already collect this information during KYC — but it is not currently exposed to buyers at the point of purchase.

A $5 per-transaction surcharge for a buyer-facing Verified Merchant Receipt would fund this and end the scam pattern industry-wide within months. We invite payment processors, regulators (FTC, Competition Bureau Canada, EU consumer protection), and consumer-protection groups to take this up. It costs us nothing as a brand to advocate for a standard that would benefit everyone.

Have you been scammed by an AI-demo vendor?

Report it. The aggregate data helps prosecutors find pattern actors.