Sort the claims by how hard they are to fake
This is the whole method, and it takes one minute to learn. Every notice makes several claims, and those claims are not equally checkable, so you check the expensive ones first.
A red flag list fails you because it treats every signal as equal weight. Most of the signals in it are free to fake. The frame that works instead is to ask, for each claim, what it would cost somebody to counterfeit it.
A check is only diagnostic against the claim being made. The same finding can be neutral, reassuring or damning depending on what the notice said.
A company formed three weeks ago is completely ordinary for a first time short film. It is a flat contradiction for somebody claiming twelve features.
The same is true of a domain registered last month. Also a director you have never heard of, and a project with no database entry. Nothing on this page means anything on its own.
So read the notice first, decide what it is claiming, and only then go looking.
The rest of this page is the checks themselves, roughly in the order of value. Then a ten minute sequence that puts them together at the end.
The union publishes a signatory search, and it settles most of this
Zero of the twenty-four pages we audited on 8 September 2026 mention that this database exists. It is free, it is public, and it is the best single check in the subject.
The tool lives at sagaftra.org under contracts and industry resources, as the signatory search, and you can query it four ways.
If a title or a company is not found, the union’s own instruction is to check with the appropriate contract department. It is not to conclude anything.
Video game projects are excluded entirely, because of title confidentiality.
Commercials are included only if they were reported to the union. So a not found result on a commercial is close to uninformative.
And the union tells even distributors that the database is not their only resource. A blank result is a reason to make a phone call, not a verdict.
Which brings us to the phone route, and these are the correct numbers rather than the general switchboard everyone quotes.
There is a rule underneath all of this that explains why the database exists in the first place. It is not a comfortable one.
Under the union’s own Global Rule One, a member may not render services for an employer. Not unless that employer has executed an agreement with the union. The union states that members carry personal responsibility for verifying that a producer is a signatory before accepting work.
So the burden is already yours, and the tool exists precisely so you can carry it.
At a legitimate union audition you will typically see a breakdown that states the agreement type. Also some sides, and possibly a sign in sheet.
You will not be shown a signatory certificate and you will not be shown a contract. Deal memos and day player contracts arrive at or after booking.
Which means the instruction to ask for proof is bad advice that produces nothing. Search the database or call Industry Relations instead.
No money on the day proves absolutely nothing
This is the most damaging false alarm in the whole category, and none of the twenty-four pages goes near it. A union signatory project can lawfully pay you nothing.
Most actors believe union status and payment travel together, so a notice offering no fee reads as automatically fake. The agreements themselves say otherwise, in writing.
Union status and money are orthogonal. No money tells you nothing about whether the project is real, and union status tells you nothing about whether you will be paid.
Only one of the two is checkable in a browser, which is why the signatory search does so much work on this page.
There is also a genuine internal contradiction to watch for. The micro budget agreement excludes projects with nudity or simulated sex, so a micro budget union project requiring nudity is an impossible combination.
The timing explains the other thing people misread. Producers are told to begin the signatory process four to six weeks before anyone travels or films. The review then takes about three business days before a representative is assigned.
Casting routinely starts inside that window. Which is exactly why a real project can honestly read as pending on the day you look it up.
The company registry, and what the date is worth
One of twenty-four pages tells you to check a state business registry. It names no state, no address and no field to look at. Here is the field to look at.
Every state runs a public entity search, usually through the Secretary of State, and you search the company name from the notice. There are four fields on the record and only one of them earns its keep.
Published state processing times put same day online formation in Delaware, Florida and Nevada. Illinois is roughly one day, and Louisiana one to two. New Mexico and Washington take two to three, while New York and California take three to seven.
So somebody who decides on Monday to run a casting scam can hold a validly registered company by Tuesday. They are a registered company is worth close to nothing.
The date is the exception, and it is diagnostic in only one direction. That direction is against a claim of history the record cannot support.
Several states let you search by officer or agent name as well as by company, and that is genuinely useful. Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Nevada and New Mexico all support it. So you can take the producer’s name and see whether a string of same week shells comes back.
Two state specific traps are worth knowing before you conclude anything.
Texas has two databases. The free comptroller tool shows tax standing and registration status, and it does not show the registered agent or the filing history. The full records search is a different, paid system that charges by the name.
So I searched Texas and found nothing very often means you searched the wrong Texas database.
Delaware publishes no officers, directors, members or shareholders, ever, at any price. You get the entity name, file number, formation date and registered agent, and that is the complete list.
The harder question is what an absence means, and none of the twenty-four pages distinguishes the three cases that produce one.
The correct wording is that an absence is a reason to escalate and never a conclusion. A presence is almost worthless as comfort.
A great deal of 2024 and 2025 writing tells actors to look up who owns a production company. The place they name is the federal beneficial ownership register.
That register was never public. It was built for law enforcement and, with consent, financial institutions. There has never been a consumer lookup.
It is now obsolete twice over. A final rule effective 14 August 2026 permanently removed the reporting requirement for United States companies and United States persons. The agency also stated it will delete existing data on people reasonably believed to be United States persons.
There is no public register of who owns an American production company. There never was one, and the non public one no longer collects them either.
The other company level check is the age of the domain, and one of twenty-four pages names a tool for it.
Use the registry lookup at lookup.icann.org, or any public domain records search. The field you want is the creation date, and it is the only one that reliably survives.
Registrant names and contacts are usually redacted for individuals under privacy rules, so do not expect to learn who owns it. You will get the registrar, the creation date, the expiry and the nameservers.
And read it the same way as the formation date. A domain registered three weeks ago for a first time indie is ordinary. A domain registered three weeks ago by a company claiming ten years of credits is a hard contradiction.
Verifying the human being who contacted you
Four of twenty-four pages tell you to check the casting society. None gives a working way to do it, and the directory address they imply returned a not found error when we checked.
Start with the taxonomy, because this is the most botched area in the whole category and it decides what a negative result means.
Nine states require an agency licence, and they are California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada and Washington do not.
That Georgia entry matters more than any of the others, and we come back to it below.
The state labour department licenses employment agencies located outside New York City. Agencies inside the city are licensed by the city’s consumer and worker protection department.
Which means essentially every theatrical agent in New York is licensed by the city rather than the state. An actor who searches a state database and finds nothing has learned nothing at all.
The city licence lookup is public and needs no account. And under state general business law a licensed theatrical agency in the city is bound by hard rules. Those rules are checkable on the face of the paperwork.
The gross fee on a single engagement may not exceed ten per cent. No deposit or advance fee may be required or accepted. No fee may be charged for registration. And the licence number must appear on all contracts, receipts and printed matter.
So anything in New York City calling itself an agent, with no licence number on its paperwork, is already out of compliance. That is before you get anywhere near the question of fraud.
For the other licensing states worth naming, California publishes its talent agency list through the labour standards enforcement division. Alongside it sits a separate and genuinely underused list of denials, revocations and suspensions. Florida runs licensing through its business and professional regulation department on 850.487.1395. Illinois publishes a list and will confirm by phone on (312) 793-2810.
One correction on a check people recommend confidently, which is that the relevant Teamsters local publishes no public member roster. So telling an actor to check the Teamsters list sends them looking for something that does not exist.
The professional body has roughly 1,200 members across several continents. It requires two sponsor letters from current members plus two years of credit as a primary casting director. People who also work as personal managers are not eligible.
We could not confirm that its public member directory is currently live. The address returned a not found error on 8 September 2026, and no directory link appears in the site navigation. We are not going to send you to a dead page.
The working route is better anyway, and the body’s president has publicly directed actors to email info@castingsociety.com and ask whether a named person is a member.
There is also a verified affiliation badge on the paid film industry database. It is confirmed directly with the professional body rather than self declared. That badge is a genuine third party signal.
Which leads to the most repeated defective tip in the category, and it is worth being precise about.
A credit on a released title is a moderately strong signal. The database requires evidence of on screen billing. It explicitly refuses call sheets, contracts and payment receipts as proof. It wants a screen grab of the titles.
A title page for an unreleased project is a weak signal. Any registered user can submit a completed title, and paying subscribers can submit projects still in development.
So a page for a film nobody has seen proves that somebody with a subscription typed it in. Which is precisely what a competent fake does first.
The better check is to take the released titles the person claims and confirm the pairing elsewhere. Use a second source that is not user generated, such as a distributor press page, a trade review or a festival listing.
Finally, the impersonation mechanics, which are cheap and quick and belong at the very start of your ten minutes.
Expand the email header and read the actual address rather than the display name. The display name is free text set by the sender. Then read the reply to address separately, because a mismatch between the two is a classic tell.
Compare any claimed domain character by character. The standard variants are an added or removed hyphen, and a different ending in place of dot com. Then a doubled letter, and the pair r and n standing in for m. Then an extra word appended, and a subdomain dressed up to look like a domain.
The public records that name the project, and the two that do not
Zero of twenty-four pages mention a state film office list or a tax credit approved project list. Zero mention permits. Both of those are real records, and one of them does not work the way everybody assumes.
There is no national registry of film titles, which is worth saying plainly because readers assume there is. What is checkable is money that came from a state.
Georgia hosts an enormous share of American production. An Atlanta shoot is one of the most claimed locations in fake notices.
It is also the state where you have the fewest checkable records of any major production centre. No talent agency licensing. No public certified production list. No public permit search that we could find.
That is not a reason to distrust Georgia projects. It is a reason to lean much harder on the union check and the person check when a notice claims one.
Now the permits, and this is the correction that we think matters most on the whole page.
New York City publishes a genuinely excellent open film permits dataset, and we read the schema. It has fourteen columns and not one of them is a title, a company or a permit holder.
What it carries is event type, start and end times, and the streets where parking is held. Then borough, community board, police precinct, category and postcode.
So you cannot look up whether a named production has a permit. You can only find out whether some permitted filming is scheduled on that block that week. That is still worth something, and it is a much smaller claim.
Two more limits are worth knowing. The city’s own council notes the dataset is missing records for permits issued in 2016 and 2017. And the publishing lag is variable and sometimes months long. So check the latest date present in the data before you read anything into an absence.
Los Angeles is worse, and in a different way.
Everyone assumes the Los Angeles permit coordinator publishes a searchable list. We looked at four of its public pages and could find no public permit search of any kind. Its online permit system is producer facing and needs an account.
What does exist is a phone line that answers permit questions from the public, on 213-977-8600, with after hours and weekend support. That is the real Los Angeles verification route, and it is a call rather than a lookup.
There is a second correction attached to it. The filming notice that gets delivered to neighbours carries the dates, a description of the scene, parking requirements and a contact number. It does not carry the production title or the company name. So asking a neighbour for the notice will not identify the project either.
Outside those two cities the pattern is consistent and simpler than people expect. Most film offices do not publish permit data and instead answer the phone. So the realistic instruction is to call the film office for the city named in the notice and ask.
It proves whether the physical logistics in the notice are real. That is to say whether a permitted shoot is scheduled at that place and time.
It does not prove who is shooting it. And it does not prove that the person emailing you has any connection to it.
It also cannot be run at all against a notice that names no location and no dates. Which is most fake notices, and is itself the finding.
And it does not apply to interiors on private property or a certified stage, which are frequently permit exempt. Nor to a process that is self tape only.
What a real notice structurally contains
The best source for this is not somebody’s opinion about good notices. It is the required fields list on the form that professional casting directors actually fill in.
The industry’s primary breakdown system will not let a poster publish without certain fields. So those fields tell you what a notice from that pipeline always has.
That last row is a genuine finding, because the platforms are not equivalent and zero of twenty-four pages says so.
The breakdown service that representatives use demands government photo identification from a new casting director before they can post anything.
One major public platform publishes detailed content rules and reserves the right to demand references and background checks. It states that listings may be removed if verification fails.
Another states in its own terms that it has no obligation to verify the identity of the persons accessing the services. It cannot guarantee the accuracy of any submitted information, including identity.
All three are legitimate places to find work, and they simply are not the same amount of reassurance. Knowing which one you are looking at changes what the sighting is worth.
The stage union publishes a standard that is even cleaner. It is the best citable definition of a proper notice in American practice.
Its audition notices must state the agreement the production operates under including the weekly salary. Then the audition dates and hours with breaks, the location with directions, and the named production personnel. Then the production dates from first rehearsal to closing, the performer types sought, preparation requirements and the role breakdown.
That is an industry body saying in black and white that a legitimate notice names the agreement and the money.
New York City requires a pay range on any advertisement for work performed in the city, from employers with four or more employees. It expressly covers independent contractors, which is how performers are usually engaged.
New York State requires the same from employers with four or more employees. It defines advertisement broadly enough to include an email sent to a pool of more than one applicant. That describes a casting call almost exactly.
California and Washington set the threshold at fifteen employees, which most single picture companies are nowhere near. So a missing range there is probably nothing.
We found no enforcement action or published guidance applying any of this to casting notices. So treat it as a reading of the statute rather than settled law. In New York City it is worth weighting. Elsewhere it usually is not.
Zero of twenty-four pages mention pay transparency law at all.
Nine things that look like warnings and are not
One of twenty-four pages says anything that functions as a correction here. This section exists because most of the anxiety in this subject is spent on the wrong signals.
A personally identifiable free mail address, of the form firstname dot lastname dot casting, satisfies the posting system’s requirement. A generic one does not.
What is genuinely abnormal is not the address. It is a free mail address combined with a refusal to move to a phone call. Or a refusal to route through a casting office. Or a claim to represent a company that demonstrably has its own domain.
The professional body’s president puts the test as channel escalation rather than domain. Any reluctance to move from a direct message to a call is the flag.
And after an initial approach, a real casting director’s further communication goes through the office rather than continuing in a private message.
There is a related pattern that this section would be incomplete without. It defeats every check on this page except one.
Real breakdowns are stolen from paid services, lightly edited and re-posted with the contact details swapped. A working casting director has documented finding her own text pirated, with qualifiers removed and deadlines changed.
So the project is real, the casting director named is real, and the dates are real. The address you would reply to belongs to somebody else entirely.
The only check that catches this is the comparison in the next section. Find the same project through a legitimate channel and compare the contact details character by character.
Her own rule is the short version, which is to only submit when you can see that particular casting director’s breakdown listed on that website.
Ten minutes, in order, with a place to stop
Twenty-one of twenty-four pages are red flag lists. Zero present an ordered procedure with a stopping rule, which is what somebody holding one notice actually needs.
This is sorted by diagnostic value per second spent, and you stop as soon as you hit a stop.
The reverse checks deserve unpacking, because zero of twenty-four pages recommend the first one and it is free.
Reverse image search the still, the logo and the profile photograph. Use more than one engine, because they index differently. It catches stock photography, stills lifted from released films, copied logos and stolen profile pictures. It misses anything generated by a machine, because there is no prior web presence to match.
Search a distinctive sentence in quotes. Choose eight to fifteen words that are specific and slightly awkward rather than generic. It catches mass mailed templates and stolen breakdowns. It misses first run text and anything paraphrased.
Search the title, the role and the casting director on the legitimate platforms and the state film office. This is the highest yield check in the set. It is the one that catches a notice where every fact is true and only the contact was swapped.
Search the name with the word scam. Also search the email address and the phone number in quotes. Reused contact details across unrelated castings are one of the cleanest signals there is.
One false positive on that last one is worth knowing in advance. A real casting director’s name will often rank for the word scam. That is precisely because they published a warning that they are being impersonated.
That is confirmation the impersonation exists, and it is not evidence against the person. It means verify the contact route rather than the individual.
None of these occurs on legitimate projects, so none of them needs any further verification.
You are asked for money, in any form, at any stage, for any reason. You are told you are cast or shortlisted before you have submitted anything.
You are asked for a social security number, a passport, a driving licence image or bank details. All before a booking is confirmed and paperwork issued.
Nudity, underwear or lingerie is requested as part of a first round submission. The casting director refuses to move from a direct message to a call or an email.
Or the contact route in the notice differs from the contact route the casting office publishes itself.
And then there is the case this page has to be honest about. You will often finish the sequence and still not know. That happens constantly with small, real, first time projects, because they have almost no public footprint by their nature. When it does, the answer is not more research. It is a controlled test. Reply and ask for the union status and agreement type, the shoot dates and location, the rate, and the name of the production company. A real production answers all four in one message, because all four are on the form the poster already filled in. A fake one deflects, changes the subject, or gets more urgent. The shape of the reply tells you what an hour of searching could not.
Grading the sources
Every lookup on this page was checked on 8 September 2026. Several did not do what they are supposed to. We would rather tell you which than send you to a dead page.
We ran six ranking queries and fetched twenty-four pages. Each was coded against a fixed eleven item checklist, all on 8 September 2026. A different query set on a different day gives a different corpus.
We coded strictly, and we downgraded four codings where the supporting quote did not support the claim. Two pages were credited with signatory verification on the strength of quotes that said only to search the company name. One named the franchised agents list, which is a different thing about agents.
Four pages that appeared in the same results were excluded and named. One is a federal consumer alert of about 350 words, and one is about modelling agencies rather than casting notices. One is written for the Australian market, and one is about choosing a video vendor.
The Australian one deserves a mention because it is the only page anywhere in the wider set that thinks of state film agency production listings at all. Its lists are Australian, which is why counting it would have inflated our number.
Two more numbers are worth stating for context. Eight of the twenty-four carry a 2026 date. Seven were last updated in 2022 or earlier, including three of the highest ranking pages in the category.
The median length is about twelve hundred words, and only two pages exceed twenty-five hundred.
Where we differ from the standard account
Zero of the twenty-four pages state what the absence of any given record means. That is the question you will actually be sitting with.
How do I check whether a union project is real?
Commonly saidNot answered. Zero of twenty-four name any way to verify signatory status.
What we foundThe union publishes a free search by title, company, identifier and year. It carries its own caveats about working titles and excluded categories.
Can I look the production up in the permit database?
Commonly saidNot raised at all. Zero of twenty-four mention permits.
What we foundThe best city dataset has fourteen columns and none of them names the production. Los Angeles has no public search, only a phone line.
Does a page on the film database prove the project exists?
Commonly saidTen of twenty-four recommend it, which makes it the most common tip in the category.
What we foundZero distinguish a credit on a released title, which needs on screen evidence. A page for an unreleased one can be typed in by any subscriber.
Should I check the state licence?
Commonly saidZero of twenty-four mention any talent agency licence lookup.
What we foundIt only means something for representation. Casting directors and production companies are licensed nowhere in the United States.
Where is a New York agent licensed?
Commonly saidNot addressed. Zero of twenty-four explain it.
What we foundAgencies inside New York City are licensed by the city, not the state. So a state search of a city agency finds nothing and proves nothing.
Does the project pay nothing, so is it fake?
Commonly saidTreated as a warning sign, and zero of twenty-four correct it.
What we foundThe student agreement defers the entire fee by design. Union status and payment are unrelated, and only one of them is checkable.
Can I find out who owns the company?
Commonly saidSeveral sources outside our set still point at the federal ownership register.
What we foundIt was never public, and domestic reporting was permanently removed in August 2026 with existing records being deleted.
Is a free email address a red flag?
Commonly saidListed as one on most pages, without qualification.
What we foundPersonally identifiable free mail is accepted by the professional posting system. The flag is refusing to move to a call, not the domain.
Does finding it on a real casting site mean it was checked?
Commonly saidUse trusted platforms, stated as though the platforms are equivalent.
What we foundOne demands government photo identification from posters. One publishes content rules. One states it has no obligation to verify identity.
What do I do when I still cannot tell?
Commonly saidNot addressed. Zero of twenty-four give an ordered procedure or a stopping rule.
What we foundAsk four questions that are already on the posting form. The shape of the reply resolves what more searching will not.
We built this page as a procedure rather than a list for one reason. A list asks you to become a good judge of character. You are not going to win that contest against somebody who does this professionally and only has to be right once. A procedure asks something much easier of you, which is to spend ten minutes looking things up in records that other people maintain and that your counterparty cannot edit. Most of what you check will come back inconclusive, and that is fine, because you are not trying to prove the project is real. You are trying to find out whether any of its claims collapse when you touch them. If none of them does, and nobody has asked you for money or documents, you have done the work that can be done. The rest is the ordinary risk of a business where most projects are small and most people are honest.