This is a repost of my article from this thread:
Why a whois isn't always a good way to judge a company's lifetime..
I keep seeing time and time again people falling into the trap thinking the date on a whois record is an accurate record of how long a company has been trading and also that any of the contact details are genuine.
Wrong, plenty of factors can determine why a company would appear as new when in fact they could have been trading years.
They could have only just decided to launch an online presence to legitimately attract more customers to their business.
For reasons beyond a companies control they could have lost their original domain name due to an unscrupulous webhost holding the domain name to ransom for one reason or another forcing a company to choose a new domain name.
Also contact info on whois, not wise to solely use that as a means of tracking down scamming individuals for starters they could simply choose to use the name of their registrar as a contact so you would have no way of tracking them down, unless you got the law involved in some way.
Even though it is now illegal to give false contact information, people will still do it.
Now onto Limited companies.
Just because a company sets themselves up as a limited company doesn't automatically make them a legitimate entity, they can still scam you all it means is their personal assets are protected from the limited company being dissolved or liquidated, well that's the case for the UK anway, unless it can be proved that the company has acted dishonestly.
So you can within reason just shut one limited company down walk away and start another one the next day even.
The companies house website is NOT an indicator as to whether a limited company is legitimate or not just tells you that they are a limited company registered in the wales, scotland or england.
However if the status on the companies house websites says that their accounts have been overdue for quite sometime then that should start some alarm bells ringing.
I would also run a credit check on any supplier you think you would like to do business with.