How to Verify an Internship Offer Letter Before Accepting

How do you verify an internship offer letter is genuine, and which identifier do you check?

Run the registration number printed on the letter through the public government register that holds it, then confirm the sender through a channel the letter did not supply. Which number you check depends on what the employer is. A company carries a Corporate Identity Number, which section 12(3)(c) of the Companies Act, 2013 puts on its business letters along with the company name, the registered-office address and a telephone number.

A limited liability partnership carries its own registration number, and a firm, a society or a proprietor carries a tax or enterprise number instead.

What you are checking	Number on the letter	Public check
Private limited, public or One Person Company	Corporate Identity Number (CIN)	View Company/LLP Master Data on mca.gov.in
Limited liability partnership	Limited Liability Partnership Identification Number (LLPIN)	The same View Company/LLP Master Data lookup
Partnership firm, society or sole proprietor	Neither a CIN nor an LLPIN exists for these forms	Whichever of the two rows below applies
Any business registered for GST	GSTIN	Taxpayer Search on the e-invoice system
Micro, small or medium enterprise	Udyam Registration Number	Verify Udyam Registration, under Print/Verify
The careers page or recruiting app	The URL itself	Suspect website and app search

What a pass proves is narrower than the row makes it look.

• A CIN that resolves shows the company is incorporated and that its master record is open to anyone.
• An LLPIN that resolves shows a registered LLP.
• A GSTIN that resolves shows a GST registration tied to a declared place of business.
• A Udyam number rests on a self-declaration, PAN-linked since 1 April 2021.
• A clear result on the suspect search shows only that no complaint about the site or app sits in that database.

Every one of them answers whether an organisation exists somewhere in a government record. None of them answers whether the stipend arrives.

What can you do with the CIN printed on the letter?

Enter it into View Company/LLP Master Data, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs lookup on mca.gov.in, then compare the letter against four of the fields the Ministry publishes in its Company Master Data catalogue: company name, status, date of registration and registered state. Section 399 of the Companies Act, 2013 gives any person the right to inspect Registrar-held documents electronically, and to require a certificate of incorporation, on payment of the prescribed fee.

The Ministry publishes the same record in bulk. Its Company Master Data catalogue lists the Corporate Identification Number, company name, status, class, date of registration, registered state and Registrar office. The single-company lookup takes the CIN exactly as the letter prints it.

• Name. Look-alike incorporations differ by a plural, a dropped "India", or "Technologies" where the letter says "Technology".
• Date of registration. An entity incorporated eleven weeks ago cannot have run a structured internship programme for six years.
• Registered state. Offices move, so a mismatch with the printed address is a question to ask, not a verdict.
• Status. A name no longer carried as active is the thing to raise with the sender before any signature.

A missing CIN is not a small omission. Section 12(8) puts a penalty of ₹1,000 for every day the default continues, capped at ₹1,00,000, on the company and every officer in default. Asking a recruiter to supply it is a question about a legal obligation.

Two details in the same section catch a forger working from a downloaded template. A company that changed its name within the last two years must print the former name beside the current one, and a One Person Company must carry those words in brackets below its name.

No CIN on the letter: which number do you ask for instead?

Ask a limited liability partnership for its LLPIN, and ask a partnership firm, a society or a sole proprietor for a GSTIN or a Udyam Registration Number. None of them prints a CIN, because section 2(20) of the Companies Act, 2013 defines a company as one incorporated under that Act or under any previous company law, and each of these is registered under a different one.

What does an LLP print instead of a CIN?

Section 21 of the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 puts the name, the registered-office address and the registration number of an LLP on its invoices, official correspondence and publications, along with a statement that it is registered with limited liability. Contravention carries a penalty of ten thousand rupees. The Limited Liability Partnership Rules, 2009 call that number the limited liability partnership identification number, or LLPIN, and it goes into the same master-data lookup as a CIN.

What do a GSTIN and a Udyam number confirm?

A GSTIN goes into the Taxpayer Search on the e-invoice system run by the National Informatics Centre. The page asks for the number and a captcha, needs no login, and is a two-minute check on a phone.

That lookup is a check on the number. The fields you compare against the letter sit on the registration certificate itself. FORM GST REG-06, prescribed under rule 10(1) of the Central Goods and Services Tax Rules, 2017, carries these fields:

• the legal name;
• the trade name, if any;
• the constitution of business;
• the address of the principal place of business;
• the date of liability.

Ask the sender for a copy and put the legal or trade name, and the state in that address, beside the letterhead.

Two limits remain. A period of validity is printed on that certificate only for a non-resident or casual taxable person, so on an ordinary registration it does not tell you the number is still live. And rule 18 of the same rules, as notified in 2017, requires a registered business to display that certificate at every place of business and its GSTIN on the name board at the entry; check the current consolidated rules for later amendments. A number on public view is a number anyone can copy.

A Udyam Registration Number goes through Verify Udyam Registration, listed under Print/Verify on the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises portal. What that confirms is the existence of a declaration.

The portal states that registration is paperless and based on self-declaration, that no documents or proof are uploaded, and that an Aadhaar number is enough to begin. It also states that a Permanent Account Number and, where the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 applies, a GSTIN have been required since 1 April 2021, with investment and turnover drawn from Income Tax and GST databases.

Both lookups have a floor below them. A small society, or a proprietor under the GST registration threshold, has neither number and is not suspect for lacking one. Records also lag filings, so an entity marked inactive may be mid-way through a filing default.

How do you confirm the letter came from the organisation rather than someone borrowing its name?

Verify through a channel the sender did not give you. A CIN, a registered address and a logo are all public, so a careful forgery quotes correct ones. Telephone the number published on the organisation's own website, not the number in the letter, and ask whether the named signatory issued it.

The careers page or app can go through the suspect website and app search on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. The portal states its database is not complete, because these identifiers are rapidly created, changed and disposed of, and that the complaints behind it are not certified. A blank result is silence, not a clean bill.

• Compare the sending domain with the domain the organisation publishes. A free mail account is common at small outfits, so confirm the sender by a second route before you rely on it.
• Read the domain slowly. Substituted characters, an extra hyphen and a swapped country suffix are the standard tricks.
• Check the signatory is named with a designation. A letter signed "HR Team" gives you nobody to confirm with.
• Ask classmates who received offers whether their letters share your reference number. Identical bulk-issued letters are a recruitment drive by nobody.

The wider pattern that marks an offer as manufactured, from instant selection to a deadline measured in hours, is set out in the guide to spotting a fake internship offer. A demand for money ends the conversation whatever the registrations say, and the guide to how the internship fee scam works shows how that demand is usually dressed up.

Which terms in an internship offer letter decide whether it is worth accepting?

Six of them: the role and the person you report to; the start date, end date and weekly hours; the stipend amount and payment date, or a plain statement that the role is unpaid; what the completion certificate depends on and who signs it; the confidentiality and intellectual-property terms; and the notice period on either side.

Two of those six bite months later. A completion certificate conditional on an unwritten standard is one the host can decline to issue, and confidentiality terms drafted for employees can keep your work out of a portfolio. Ask for both in writing before you reply to the offer.

The label matters as well. An unpaid, open-ended arrangement with no deliverable and no supervision may not be an internship at all, and the legal difference between volunteering and an internship decides what you can later claim it was. Where the role is unpaid but structured, the law on unpaid internships in India is set out separately.

A recruiter who will not repeat a term in an e-mail has told you what the term is worth. And every check in this guide sets a floor. A registered, active, GST-paying company can still assign no work, pay nothing and issue no certificate.

What do you do with a forged internship offer letter?

Keep it and stop. Do not sign, and do not send identity documents. Save the message with its full headers, which record the route it travelled and cannot be faked by copying a letterhead. Then write once to the organisation through a contact route you found yourself, quoting the letter's reference number, and ask it to confirm or disown the offer.

If the letter uses a real company's name and that company disowns it, tell the company. Impersonation damages it too, and its legal team can act faster than an individual can. A fraudulent offer can be reported to the Ministry of Home Affairs through India's National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal.

Tell your placement cell the same day. Forged offers arrive in batches, worked off one leaked list, so a warning that reaches the year group in a morning is worth more than a single complaint.

Does a credited internship need more than a genuine offer letter?

Yes. A letter that survives every check above still has to satisfy your own department's credit rules, which sit in your university's ordinance or your institution's internship regulations rather than in anything the employer signs, and where the work is remote there is a separate guide to University Grants Commission credit for an online internship. The no-objection certificate for an internship has its own guide.