I've had a handful of conversations now with people who came to me after a bad experience with someone else - a site that never got finished, a developer who vanished after the deposit, a "custom" build that turned out to be a broken template. None of these people were careless or naive. They just didn't know what to check for, because most people only hire a developer once every few years, and the industry doesn't exactly make its own warning signs obvious.
This isn't a pitch for hiring me specifically. It's the list I wish someone had handed every one of those people before they paid anything.
They ask for full payment upfront
A deposit before work begins is completely normal - securing a project slot, covering initial planning, that's standard practice almost everywhere. Full payment before any work has started is not normal, and it's the single clearest warning sign on this list. If something goes wrong, if they disappear, if the work is unusable, you have zero leverage left because you've already paid for everything.
A reasonable structure looks like a deposit upfront, then remaining payments tied to actual milestones or delivery. If someone insists on 100% before starting, walk away - no exceptions, no matter how convincing the reason sounds.
There's no written scope, just a verbal agreement
If your entire understanding of what you're getting exists in a WhatsApp conversation with no actual document laying out what's included, what's not, and what the timeline looks like, you have no real reference point when a disagreement happens later - and disagreements about scope happen on almost every project, even good ones.
This doesn't need to be a formal legal contract. Even a simple written summary - "here's what's included, here's the timeline, here's the cost" - sent over email is enough to protect both sides. If someone resists putting anything in writing, ask yourself why.
They can't show you real, live work
Screenshots are easy to fake or cherry-pick. A legitimate developer should be able to send you live links to real projects they've actually built - sites you can visit, click around, and evaluate yourself. If everything is "under NDA" or "I can only show screenshots," that's worth pushing back on. Some client work is genuinely confidential, sure - but a developer with zero shareable live examples at all is a real gap, not a coincidence.
The price feels impossibly good with zero explanation
A very low price isn't automatically a scam - plenty of legitimate developers, especially in places with a lower cost of living, can genuinely offer lower rates without cutting corners. The red flag isn't the low number itself. It's a low number with no explanation behind it, from someone who can't or won't tell you what's actually included for that price.
Ask directly: what does this cover, and what would make the price go up. A legitimate answer sounds specific - number of pages, features, revision rounds. A vague answer, or visible irritation at being asked, tells you something too.
They go quiet the moment payment clears
This one you can't always catch before hiring someone, but you can ask about it directly. What does support look like after launch? Is there a maintenance plan, and what does it actually cover? A developer who gets noticeably vaguer or more evasive once you start asking about the after-launch relationship is telling you something honest, even if unintentionally.
What to actually do with this list
None of these signs alone is automatically proof of a scam - context matters, and reasonable people sometimes have reasonable explanations. But two or three of these showing up together in the same conversation is a real pattern worth taking seriously, not a coincidence to explain away because you're excited to get started.
The people I've talked to who got burned all describe the same feeling afterward - a nagging discomfort they noticed early on and talked themselves out of, because the person seemed nice enough and they didn't want to seem paranoid over something small. Trust that discomfort. It's usually not small.