How verification works (and why we won't fake it)
There's a thing that happens on a lot of marketplaces. You see a "Verified" badge next to a profile, and you assume it means something. Then you find out the verification was an automatic email confirmation and the badge gets handed out to anyone who signs up. The word stops meaning anything, but it keeps showing up — on every listing — because removing it would look like a downgrade.
We don't want to do that.
What "verified" means on Welpco
On Welpco, a Welper is verified when two things have happened:
- They've confirmed their identity. That's a phone number tied to a real device, plus a government-issued ID we check against the name on the account.
- Welpco has reviewed the listing. A person on our team has read what they're offering, looked at the photos, and made sure nothing in the listing is misleading or inappropriate.
That's it. A verified badge means the person you're booking is who they say they are, and what they say they offer is what we believe they're offering.
It does not mean we've rated them five stars. It does not mean they're insured. It does not mean we've endorsed their work. We're trying very hard to keep the badge to one job: telling you that the human on the other end is real.
Why we don't auto-verify everyone
You can probably guess. If we marked every account "verified" the second they signed up, two things would happen. The badge would stop being a useful filter — every Welper would have it, so no one would. And the moment someone faked their way through, we'd be shipping a label that misled the customer instead of helping them. The only thing worse than no verification is verification that lies to you.
Some of this is in the bible we keep for ourselves. The short version: a five-star average from one review is noise, not signal. A verified badge that everyone has is decoration, not data. We'd rather show "No reviews yet" honestly than fake a number we don't have, and we'd rather show "Identity not yet verified" honestly than print a green checkmark we haven't earned.
What we're still working on
A few things we want to be straight about, because they're not in the verification flow yet: