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Methodology & Sources

How every number on this site is computed · Last updated: 3 July 2026

The principle

Nothing on this site asks for trust. Every figure we publish is computed from public records, and this page explains how — so you can check our working. If a claim can't be traced to a filing, a notice, or a computation described here, we don't publish it.

Data sources

At the time of writing the platform covers approximately 5.7M companies, 53M officer records and 15.6M PSC records.

The homepage figures, one by one

"Marked 'active' — actually dead"

The count of companies whose registered status is still Active while their own filing history contains live insolvency proceedings — appointments of administrators, liquidators or receivers, or corresponding Gazette notices. We cross-reference the status field against insolvency case records and count the contradictions. Recomputed from register data as it changes.

"A fabricated balance sheet"

We compare each company's dormancy status against the balance sheet it actually filed. A company filing dormant accounts while simultaneously declaring material net assets or cash is a contradiction worth review. The headline figure is the largest single instance of this contradiction on the register at the time of publication — a dormant-coded shell whose filed accounts claimed tens of billions of pounds in assets.

"Companies at one letterbox"

The count of companies registered at a single registered-office address, and the share of those companies in liquidation or other insolvency states. Mass-occupancy addresses are common and often legitimate (agents, accountants, insolvency practitioners); we flag the concentration so a reviewer can judge the context — concentration alone is not an allegation against any address, agent or company.

"Records updated in the last 24 hours"

The count of company records whose data changed in the trailing 24 hours via the streaming API — computed as count(companies where updated_at > now() − 24h), cached for up to an hour. If the figure is unavailable it is hidden rather than estimated.

Homepage figures are point-in-time snapshots and are refreshed periodically; the live database may differ at any given moment. Where a figure is dated ("as of Jun 2026"), that is the computation date.

AI investigations

An investigation brief is compiled by an AI model over the structured register data plus grounded web search. It is governed by rules we enforce in code, not just in prompts:

Signals, not findings

Everything we surface — status contradictions, address concentration, network patterns, AI flags — is a signal for professional review drawn from public records, not a finding of wrongdoing, a credit decision, or advice. Two legitimate businesses can trip the same pattern as a fraud; the point of the platform is to hand a professional the evidence quickly, not to reach verdicts for them.

Corrections

If you believe a published figure is wrong, or a record about you or your company is inaccurate, email [email protected]. We review every report; register-sourced errors are also correctable at source via Companies House.

Register early-warning & network-exposure figures

"The public warning fires 76 days before a company dies": for compulsory liquidations, we measure the gap between the winding-up petition date and the winding-up order date, both taken from the same Companies House insolvency case records. Across 10,271 compulsory liquidations: mean 76 days, median 52. This measures formal-record lead time; it makes no claim about press coverage timing.

"1 in 13 active companies shares a director with one that failed" (7.8%): active UK companies sharing at least one resolved director identity with a company that is dissolved, has an insolvency event, or lists a disqualified director — computed across the full register population (5.6M active companies, 12.5M active directorships). This is a floor: datasets retain only a fraction of historically dissolved companies. A shared director indicates exposure, not wrongdoing.

"9,460 currently banned directors": individuals whose disqualification window (from ≤ today ≤ until) is active on the Companies House disqualified-directors register at the time of measurement; recomputed continuously.