FAQ
Short answers for students in India. Internships come first: placement season, UPI fees, WhatsApp recruiters, and Aadhaar or OTP requests. Job offers use the same desk.
Heuristic indicator score, not a probability of fraud.
The public site is a free beta for students. Paid tiers for colleges and placement cells are planned.
TrustIntern is an investigation desk for students in India. It looks at the company name, recruiter email, website, message text, and an offer-letter PDF or screenshot. Internship offers come first, including placement-season messages, UPI registration fees, WhatsApp recruiters, and requests for Aadhaar or an OTP. Job offers can be checked with the same desk.
The public site is a free beta for students. Paid tiers for colleges and placement cells are planned. It is not a promise that the checker is free for everyone.
Heuristic indicator score, not a probability of fraud. It runs from 0 to 100. Every point is tied to a piece of evidence, and anyone can recompute it by hand from backend/CONTRACT.md. The score does not call any company a scammer.
Fixed rules assign the points. Gemma plans which research agents to launch, reads the offer letter or screenshot, and writes the plain-language summary. Gemma never scores.
An upfront fee is the heaviest indicator, worth 25 points. A placement-season message that asks for a registration, training, kit, or certificate fee, often over UPI on WhatsApp, raises that indicator. The result is still a heuristic indicator score, not a probability of fraud.
A request for Aadhaar, PAN, bank details, or an OTP is the sensitive-data indicator, worth 20 points. Paste the message into the desk and read the evidence next to the points.
A personal email provider such as Gmail is worth 5 points. An email domain that does not match the company is worth 20 points. Internship notes that arrive on WhatsApp are checked as message text. Job-offer messages use the same indicators.
The hosted site falls back to the Gemini API, so a PDF or screenshot submitted there is sent to that API for Gemma to read. A local install can run Gemma through Ollama instead. The score does not depend on the model.
No. The built-in examples are fictional composites. The suspicious composite scores 90 when live lookups are off. That number demonstrates the arithmetic. It is not a label on a real company.
Upfront fee 25, domain mismatch 20, sensitive data 20, young domain 15, offer conflict 15, unrelated domain 10, urgency 10, and personal email 5. The total is capped at 100 and is never reduced. The rules are written in backend/CONTRACT.md and backend/app/scoring.py.