How to check that a drone search service is real
Somebody whose animal went missing last night is the easiest person in the world to take money from. They are frightened, they have not slept, and they will act on the first thing that sounds like hope. People know this, and they work the lost-pet groups on purpose.
So this page is not an argument that you should hire us. It is the set of checks that separate a real operator from someone with a stolen photograph of a drone — every one of them public, free, and quick enough to run at two in the morning on a phone. Run them on us. Then run them on anybody else who offers to help, and especially on anybody who turned up in your comments uninvited.
Four checks, none of them slow
A real operator passes all four and will not mind being asked. Somebody who becomes evasive at the word "license" has already answered the question.
The pilot is licensed, and the license is public
Flying a drone for anything other than recreation requires an FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate. This is not a trade badge or a formality — it is federal law, and it means the person flying over your neighborhood has been tested on airspace, weather, and the places they are not permitted to be.
Every certificate is held in a public FAA database, searchable by name. Ask for the name on the certificate and look it up yourself. It takes about thirty seconds.
Search the FAA airman registry (opens in a new tab)
Aerial HaloAsk and we will give you the certificated name to search, along with our insurance certificate. Nobody has ever been a nuisance for asking.
The business exists on paper
A company operating in Texas is registered with the state and pays tax under a name somebody signed for. A business that appears in neither registry is not a business — it is a social media page and a payment handle, and there is nothing behind it to complain to afterwards.
Search the legal name in the Comptroller's taxable entity search. If the name they gave you returns nothing, ask what name they are registered under. There is usually no second answer.
Texas Comptroller taxable entity search (opens in a new tab)
Aerial HaloWe operate under the legal name printed in the footer of this page and on every agreement we send — the same name in both places, which is the point of the check. Ask for the registration details and you will have them.
They bill like a business
A real operator invoices through a payment processor and you pay by card, which makes the transaction traceable, disputable, and reversible if the work is never done. That protection is precisely what the other kind cannot afford to give you.
Watch which payment rail they steer you towards. A deposit demanded by Zelle, Cash App, Venmo friends-and-family, gift cards, wire or crypto is the entire scam in a single sentence: every one of those is chosen for being irreversible, and none of them is how a legitimate company takes a deposit.
Aerial HaloWe invoice through a payment processor and you pay by card. You get a written agreement with the price on it before anybody is dispatched, and the cancellation terms are published on the pricing page rather than explained to you after the fact.
They have a history you can read
Recovery work leaves a trail — reviews written months apart, by people with ordinary accounts, describing searches that sound like searches, including the ones that did not end with the animal. A page with no history, or with a burst of five-star reviews all posted the same week, is telling you how old it really is.
Read the one- and three-star reviews first. Anybody can accumulate praise; how a company answers a bad week is the part that predicts your own experience. Then check that the dates are spread out rather than clustered.
Aerial HaloAsk for references from previous searches, including one that did not end with the animal found. An operator who cannot produce the second kind has either not flown many searches or is only telling you about the good ones.
The scam that comes to you: fake recommendations on Facebook
The most common drone-search scam does not buy advertising and does not wait to be found. It works the comments under lost-pet posts — in neighborhood groups and county lost-and-found pages, in the hours right after you post. It is worth understanding in detail, because it is built specifically to defeat the checks above by making you feel you have already done them.
How the play runs
- You post that your dog is missing. Within a few hours a stranger comments recommending a drone service by name — a name you have not heard of and cannot quite place, usually two or three words, an animal word and a finding word and something like "drone", "thermal" or "recovery".
- The recommendation is warm, specific and very recent. They found this commenter's own dog last week. Often there is a detail engineered to sound unarguable — a creek bed, a time after midnight, a distance in miles. Nothing in the story can be checked by anyone, which is the reason the story exists.
- Other accounts arrive to agree. They react to the comment, reply "yes, they found ours too", or simply add "seconding this". The purpose of the second and third voice is not the information they add — it is that you stop reading it as one stranger's suggestion and start reading it as the group's consensus.
- You message the page. They are responsive, sympathetic, and available tonight — but they need a deposit up front to hold the slot, by Zelle, Cash App, Venmo or gift card. The urgency is not enthusiasm. It is there to move you past the pause in which you would have checked something.
- The money goes and the pilot does not. Sometimes there is a second request before the silence — a fuel surcharge, a permit fee, a second drone — because somebody who has already paid once is the best prospect they have.
What gives it away
Rarely all of these at once. Two or three together is enough to stop and check before you send anything.
Nobody found them — they found you
Legitimate operators get hired because somebody went looking for help, or because a vet, a shelter or a previous client passed the name along. Appearing uninvited in the comments of a stranger's worst day is not a sales channel real businesses use, and on its own it is the strongest signal on this list.
The vouching accounts are thin
Open the profile of whoever recommended them. Created recently, few friends, a profile photo that looks like stock or like nobody in particular, no local history, and a comment record consisting of lost-pet posts and nothing else. Real neighbors have years of unrelated life on their accounts.
The vouching accounts are not from here
Check where the recommenders actually live, and where they claim the search happened. The same praise for the same company turns up under lost-pet posts several states apart, because the accounts work a national list rather than a neighborhood. A recovery in another state is not a recommendation for your street.
The business page has no past
No reviews at all, or a cluster of five-star reviews posted within days of one another. Few posts, none of them older than a couple of months. On Facebook, open Page transparency — it shows the creation date, the countries the administrators are in, and every previous name the page has used. A page that was selling something else in the spring is not a recovery service.
The service area is wherever you happen to be
Ask where they are based and what they charge to drive to you. A real operator has a home county, a mileage rate, and honest limits on how far it is worth coming. The fake one covers everywhere, because it is not going anywhere.
They will not answer the license question
Ask for the name on the Part 107 certificate and the legal name of the business. A real operator answers in one message. The other kind changes the subject, sends a photograph of a drone instead, takes offense at being asked, or sends a certificate image whose number returns nothing in the FAA registry.
The money has to move on a rail you cannot reverse
A deposit demanded by Zelle, Cash App, Venmo friends-and-family, gift cards, wire or crypto, before anything is written down. This is the point of the entire exercise, and it is the last moment at which the damage is still avoidable.
The photographs are not theirs
Reverse image search the drone photos and the thermal shots on the page. Stock imagery, or a picture belonging to a real operator in another part of the country, ends the conversation.
What to do
- Do not reply to the recommendation in the comments, and do not ask the group whether it is legitimate. Both push the comment up the thread, where it is seen by everybody else posting about a missing animal that night.
- Run two checks before you message anyone: the FAA registry for the pilot's name, and the Texas entity search for the company's. Together they take about a minute, and they end most of these outright.
- Never send a deposit on a rail you cannot reverse. If the only way to book is Zelle, Cash App, gift cards or crypto, you have your answer, whatever else the page says.
- Report the comment and the page to Facebook.
If you have already paid
It happens to careful people, and being embarrassed about it is what the scheme relies on next. Move quickly — some of it is recoverable, and the reporting is what gets the accounts taken down before they reach the next owner.
- Contact your bank or the payment app immediately and say the word fraud. Card payments can often be charged back. Zelle and wire transfers are the hardest, but banks do sometimes recall a recent one, and speed is the only variable you control.
- Screenshot everything before it disappears — the comment thread, the profiles that vouched, the page itself, your messages, and the payment confirmation. These pages are deleted or renamed within days.
- Report it to the FTC and to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. These reports are what connect one page to a pattern running across several states, and they cost you about ten minutes.
- Then keep searching. Losing money to this is not the same as losing the animal, and the practical things — flyers, the immediate radius, the local groups — still work. Our flyer builder is free and does not ask you for anything.
Report fraud to the FTC (opens in a new tab)FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (opens in a new tab)
What we will not do
Stated here so that our own conduct is something you can hold us to, and so that it is obvious when somebody is impersonating us:
- We do not comment on lost-pet posts recommending ourselves.
- We do not take deposits by Zelle, Cash App, gift card or crypto, ever. If somebody using our name asks you to, it is not us — tell us, and we will report it.
- We do not promise to find your animal, and we will tell you when a search is unlikely to be worth your money before you spend it. An operator who guarantees a recovery is either lying or has not flown many searches.
Checking us
The same standard, turned around. Everything here is either a public record or a document you can ask for and have in one reply.
Anything above that you would rather verify than take on trust — the certificated pilot name, the insurance certificate, the registered legal entity — ask, and you will have it in writing. If we ever fail to produce it, that is worth knowing about us too.
If we check out, tell us what happened
Send the details and you will get a straight read on whether a thermal search fits your case, including when it does not. Nothing is booked and nothing is charged at that stage.