Trust the Tri-Cities Board
Real people. Real companies. Real licences.
Anonymity is what makes online fraud cheap. So we made it expensive: the people advertising property, businesses, and services here have proven who they are, and the badge on a listing tells you exactly which claims were checked and by whom.
The verification ladder
Four separate claims, four separate checks. Each one is independent, and a badge appears only when that specific check actually passed.
A reachable person
Every account that posts confirms a working mobile number by text code.
Enforced in the database, not just the form: a listing physically cannot be published from an account with an unconfirmed number.
A real, identified person
ID verifiedGovernment photo identification, confirmed against a live selfie.
Handled entirely by Stripe Identity. Your document photo goes to Stripe and never to us — we keep the result, your verified legal name, the document type, and the date. Required before any Homes & Spaces listing goes live and before any business or organization profile is submitted or claimed.
A real company
BC registered companyThe company name on the advertisement matches an active record in BC Registries.
Checked automatically against OrgBook BC, the province’s public registry search. A name that does not match gets no badge and raises the listing’s risk score for review.
OrgBook BCA real licence
Licence verifiedA claimed real estate or brokerage licence number was found on the B.C. public register.
Anyone advertising in a licensed capacity must give their licence number, and the listing is held back until an administrator looks the number up by hand on the BCFSA register. There is no automated feed for this, so a person does the check.
BCFSA — Find a Professional
What a badge does not mean
A verified identity means a real, identified person stands behind the account. It is not a guarantee that they own the property, hold authority to advertise it, told the truth about the rent, or will be pleasant to deal with.
Tri-Cities Board hosts advertisements and messages. We are not a brokerage, agent, dealer, escrow service, or payment processor. We do not take applications, screen renters, write leases, collect deposits, or audit the financial figures in a business-for-sale advertisement. Verify the property, the advertiser’s authority, the terms, and any stated financials independently — the Safety Centre walks through how.
What verification costs
Identity verification is $5.00 CAD, once, for your whole account — it covers every listing and profile you post from then on. The fee goes to the cost of the check itself; it is not a listing fee.
Businesses on a paid plan pay nothing: we cover it. Everyone else gets it back as advertising — verify successfully and we issue you 500 free ad impressions on the spot.
Ordinary marketplace item listings stay free and need no ID. The gate is for the places where real money and real homes are involved.
What happens to your ID
Your document photo and selfie go directly to Stripe, our identity provider. They never pass through or rest on Tri-Cities Board servers, and no administrator here can retrieve them.
What we store is the outcome: verified or not, your verified legal name, the document type, a session reference, and the dates. Full detail is in Section 6B of the Privacy Policy and Section 6C of the Terms of Use.
Monitoring, reports, and evidence
Every listing is scored for known fraud patterns — duplicated photos, prices far below the local market, repeated identifiers, mismatched company names, pressure to move the conversation off the platform. Scoring flags listings for people to look at; administrators, not scores, decide what happens.
When something is reported, we preserve a snapshot of the listing, its images, and the relevant messages so the record survives even if the advertiser deletes everything. Serious matters can be referred to police with that record intact.
Scammers are not welcome here
This is a board for neighbours in Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, and Port Moody. Faking an identity to advertise here means faking a government document — and that raises the stakes far beyond a deleted account. That is the deterrent, and it is deliberate.
Stay in it