Can you trust the trust company?
Fair question. You're about to wire thousands of dollars to strangers in a country you've probably never been to — partly on our say-so. Here's exactly who we are, how the check works, and what it can't do.
Who built this
I built SafariVerify. I lived in Arusha and saw the same painful story play out again and again — travellers arriving full of excitement for the trip of a lifetime, only to discover the operator they'd wired a deposit to wasn't who they claimed to be, or honest local guides losing work to slicker scammers with better Instagram pages.
This is my small contribution to a country I love: a simple, honest tool that helps visitors travel with confidence and helps real local providers get the trust they've already earned. Better experiences for everyone on both sides of the booking. Hakuna matata.
We're starting in Tanzania — the safari capital of East Africa and the market I know best — to prove the verdict works. East Africa is next, and the long-term aim is any adventure-travel market where strangers wire deposits to operators they've never met.
We don't take money from operators to influence scores. That's the entire premise; if we broke it, we'd have no product.
How the check actually works
When you enter an operator's name, we do four things in sequence:
- Search the live web across TripAdvisor, Reddit, Trustpilot, scam-report boards, and forum threads — not a stale internal database.
- Check public licence records including the TATO (Tanzania Association of Tour Operators) registry where available — equivalent registries in other markets get added as we expand.
- Look for red-flag patterns like personal mobile-money requests, fake-review clusters, complaint volume, and recent name changes.
- Synthesise with AI into one verdict — SAFE, CAUTION, or STOP — with the actual sources we used, so you can verify our reasoning yourself.
Every report is generated fresh. No operator can pay to be listed, boosted, or scored higher. The Operator Dashboard tier on our pricing page is an admin tool — it does not influence trust scores.
What it can't tell you
- Brand-new operators with no online footprint will return a "not enough signal" result — absence of evidence isn't proof they're a scam, but it's also not a green light.
- Private WhatsApp or Instagram scams happen one-to-one and don't leave a public trace. For those, paste the actual conversation into Conversation Check.
- We can flag patterns and surface evidence. We can't guarantee an outcome. Always use a chargeback-protected payment method for deposits.
Contact
Found a wrong call, a missing source, or an operator we should look at? Email gosafariverify@gmail.com. We read everything.