If you are considering dental work or a health check in China from abroad, you will quickly hit a problem that has nothing to do with medicine: you cannot tell the companies apart. A dozen English-language websites offer near-identical promises — vetted hospitals, bilingual coordinators, savings of 60–70%. Most are less than two years old. Some are staffed operations. Some are unattended websites.

This guide is the checklist we would use ourselves. Every step is free, takes minutes, and needs no special tools — and you should run all seven on us as readily as on anyone else.

None of this is medical advice, and none of it is a legal accusation about any company. It is a method for asking better questions.

Why this is hard right now

Cross-border medical travel to China is growing fast, and websites have appeared faster than businesses have. Building a hundred-page site that looks like a decade-old firm now costs almost nothing. That does not make those sites fraudulent — but it does mean the surface of a website has stopped being evidence of anything, and readers need checks that go underneath it.

The seven checks below are ordered by how much they tell you per minute spent.

1. Check how old the website is

Every domain has a public registration date. Look it up free at any WHOIS or RDAP lookup — search “RDAP lookup” and paste the domain in.

Then compare it with what the company claims about itself. A firm that says it has served patients for a decade on a domain registered eight months ago may have a perfectly good explanation — a rebrand, a new market, a previous domain. Ask for it. What you are testing is not the age, it is whether the claims and the record agree.

Somewhere on the site there should be a registered company name and the jurisdiction it is registered in. Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, New Zealand — the country matters less than the existence.

Without a legal entity you have no counterparty. If a payment goes wrong, or treatment is not what was arranged, there is nobody to hold to the agreement. A trading name alone is not a company.

3. Look for a named human

Find one person: a founder, a director, a clinical lead. A full name, ideally with a photograph and a professional profile you can search independently.

This is the check most sites in this category fail, and it is the one that matters most for a service built on trust. A named person has a reputation to protect. An anonymous website does not.

4. Test the contact details before you need them

Message the WhatsApp number. Send a small, specific question. See what comes back and how fast.

Two numbers worth recognising: +86 138 0013 8000 and +86 138 0000 0000 are placeholder examples, the Chinese equivalent of 555-0100. If a company’s published number is one of these, nobody is on the other end.

This check costs one message and rules out a whole category of problem.

5. See whether clinics are named

Ask, before any payment: which specific clinic or hospital will treat me?

“Top-tier 3A hospitals” and “JCI-accredited partners” cannot be checked. A named clinic can — you can look up its rating, find its address, read what local patients say, and if you want, telephone it yourself.

A facilitator who will not name the clinic before payment is asking you to buy something unspecified.

6. Ask how they are paid

There are three honest models: you pay a service fee, the clinic pays a commission, or both. Each has different incentives, and none of them is disqualifying.

What matters is whether you get a straight answer, and one specific follow-up: are the prices you quote me the clinic’s own listed rates, or marked up? You are entitled to know whether you are seeing the clinic’s price or the middleman’s.

7. Look for proof from outside their own website

Testimonials on a company’s own site are marketing copy. They cost nothing to write.

Search the company name on review platforms, on Reddit, in Facebook expat groups, in the press. You are looking for traces the company did not author. A handful of independent mentions is worth more than fifty five-star quotes on a homepage.

Be fair about this one: a genuinely new company has few external traces, and that is a reason for caution rather than suspicion. What should concern you is a company claiming ten years of operation with no external trace at all.

People search for this specific question often enough that it is worth showing the method on a real example rather than a hypothetical one. We are a competitor, so read what follows knowing that — and check every fact yourself. Everything below is public record as at August 2026.

What checks 2 and 5 return: SinoCareLink states that it is a trading name of Soul Haven Limited, a company registered in Hong Kong, so a named legal entity exists. It also names specific partner hospitals and named dentists rather than referring only to “3A hospitals”, so check 5 can be run on it.

What the checks return that is worth asking about: its footer states “10+ Years” of experience and “100+” partner hospitals, while the public registry record shows the domain sinocarelink.org was registered on 30 December 2025. Its about page lists no founder or team member by name, no physical address and no telephone number — only an email address.

What we are not saying: we are not saying the company is illegitimate, and we do not know that it is. A ten-year-old business can launch a new domain. What we are saying is that these are the questions the checklist produces, and that a prospective patient is entitled to put them to the company directly and see what answer comes back.

Apply it to us too

We are a facilitator, so run the same seven checks on this site before you take our word for anything. Two things you can verify immediately: we name our five Shanghai partner clinics in full, in Chinese, with their own listed prices — see our Shanghai dental guide — and the prices we publish are the clinics’ own listed or promotional rates, not rates we negotiated or marked up, as stated in our price index. Outside Shanghai we have no partner clinics, and we say so on every city page rather than implying national coverage.

The one rule underneath all seven

Do not send significant money to anyone who has not named the clinic in writing.

Everything else on this checklist is a way of getting more comfortable. That single rule is the one that prevents the failure that actually costs people money.

If you want help thinking through a specific trip, our guide to how a medical concierge in China works explains the process end to end, and our dental cost guides give you reference ranges before anyone quotes you a number.