Primary records
Court judgments and filings, regulator actions and orders, insolvency and administration documents, and official company registries. These are the records that establish facts: a charge, a finding, a conviction, a settlement, a directorship and its dates. When a primary record exists, it decides the claim.
Dated reporting from named outlets
Investigative and business reporting that carries a byline, a date and identifiable sourcing. Strong reporting often surfaces a story before the primary record catches up, and it provides context the filings leave out. We cite it, and we prefer it in clusters rather than relying on a single article.
Aggregators and risk-score sites
Automated adverse-media pages, reputation scores and "risk index" listings. We treat these strictly as leads: a prompt to go and find the primary record, never a verdict in themselves. The reason is structural. Many of these systems score the association between a name and a negative keyword, not verified conduct, and they rarely model control timelines. A founder whose name appears next to a company's later collapse gets scored as high-risk even when the record shows they had already sold up and left. That is a false positive by design, and it is exactly the kind of claim our checks exist to correct.
The distinctions we hold to
Across every tier we keep three words apart: an allegation is a claim someone has made, a charge is a formal accusation, and a finding or conviction is an outcome decided by a court or regulator. We never present one as another. And we separate the company from the person: a corporate fine, settlement or insolvency does not, by itself, establish anything against an individual. How that plays out in practice is covered in how we check.