Step one: intake
A complaint reaches us as a message, usually long. The first pass separates three things that arrive mixed together: events with dates, documents, and interpretation. Only the first two can travel further. The interpretation stays in the correspondence, where it belongs, because a reader's conclusion about why something happened is not evidence that it happened that way.
What survives intake is a timeline: what was opened, when, with what amounts, through which payment method, and what was said by whom. If a reader cannot supply dates or records, we say so to him plainly and the letter stays in the file without becoming a report.
Step two: the right of reply
Before anything about a platform is published, we look for a contact of record: an address published by the operator itself, on its own site or in a register entry, rather than a support form that answers to nobody in particular. Where we find one, the substance of the complaint goes to it, along with the same five questions we ask everyone: who operates the service, under what authorisation, where client money is held, how complaints are handled, and whether the service has traded under other names.
Where we find no contact of record, we say that no letter was sent and why. We do not describe a platform as having failed to respond when we cannot show that it was asked.
Step three: the record search
Names are checked against public registers and company records. The outcome is written down in one of three forms: found and cited, not found, or not checkable because the platform names no company to check. Those three are different findings and we never print one as another. An empty search result says something about the register, not about the platform's honesty, and the report keeps that distinction.
Step four: what reaches the page
Three standards govern the text. A fact stated plainly must be traceable to a public record or to a document we hold. A claim by the platform is reported only as a claim, in that frame. A pattern in the category is reported as a pattern and marked as not alleged about the platform under discussion.
Anything that fails all three is left out, and if leaving it out makes a report short, the report stays short.
What this method cannot do
It cannot tell you that a platform is safe. Absence of complaints in our file is absence of evidence, and our file is small. It cannot confirm that a licence exists in a register we did not search or in a language we misread. It cannot detect a business that is honest today and is not tomorrow.
Treat every report here as a description of a search, with its date attached, rather than as a verdict that will still hold next year.