We’ve written before about scams. Remember, last time it was your long lost uncle who left you a large inheritance. Well, the tricksters are back at it. Actually, they never really went away. Perhaps their tactics just got a bit more brazen.

It seems lately they want you to believe that a lawyer in Brazil is involved in these fake transactions. The goal is to make you think that everything is on the up and up. It must be if there’s a lawyer, right? Wrong.

And so, we get the call asking us for help. The caller wants to know whether Mr. John Doe, who claims to be a Brazilian lawyer, actually is a lawyer. The good news is that you can easily check this out for yourself.

The Brazilian Bar Association, known as the OAB (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil), regulates the practice of law in Brazil and maintains a searchable database of lawyers admitted to practice throughout the country. You can search by name or registration number. You can also filter the search by location.

Perhaps the easiest thing to do when you’re trying to figure out if a lawyer is for “real” or not is to ask the question - so what is your OAB number? Then all you have to do is enter the number in the OAB search tool and see what name pops up.

Want to give it a try? Click here. With just a few minutes, you might save yourself thousands of dollars.