How to tell whether a Brazilian company actually exists

What a CNPJ is, what its registration status means, and the specific mismatches that indicate you are not dealing with who you think you are.

Last reviewed 3 August 2026

The CNPJ is the anchor

The CNPJ (Cadastro Nacional da Pessoa Jurídica) is a 14-digit number identifying a legal entity with Brazil’s federal revenue service. It is public, it is on their invoices, and everything else you can check hangs off it. A trading name is not an identifier; a CNPJ is.

Note the last four digits before the check digits identify the branch. Head office is 0001. A quote from head office and an invoice from a different branch is not automatically wrong, but it is a difference worth understanding rather than ignoring.

Registration status is the single most useful field

A CNPJ registration is active, suspended, unfit (inapta), or closed (baixada). Active is what you expect. Anything else is a genuine finding: an unfit registration usually means the company stopped filing required returns, and a closed one means it has formally ceased to exist as a trading entity.

Where a registration is not active there is often a stated reason, and it is worth reading. It is the field that distinguishes a dormant company from an administratively struck-off one, and the two carry very different risk.

The mismatches that matter

Compare the registered legal name against the name on the invoice and the name on the bank account. These three agreeing is unremarkable; any of them disagreeing is worth a direct question before payment. The most common loss does not involve a fake company at all — it involves a real company and a substituted bank account.

Compare the registered address against where goods are supposedly shipping from. And compare the incorporation date against the trading history the supplier describes. A company claiming fifteen years in the business with a CNPJ registered in 2025 is a conversation you want to have before the money moves, not after.

What existence does not prove

A company can be entirely real, properly registered, active, decades old — and still fail to ship. Verification establishes that a counterparty exists and is who they say. It says nothing about capacity, solvency, or intent.

That is worth stating plainly because "I checked the company" is often taken to mean more than it does. The check narrows the failure modes; it does not eliminate them.

Common questions

Can I look up a CNPJ myself for free?

Yes. The federal revenue service publishes registration data, and a single lookup is straightforward. What is slow by hand is everything after that — the forced-labour register, federal debarment and environmental embargoes are published as bulk files with no per-company search, which is the part a report saves you.

What if the supplier will not give me a CNPJ?

Treat that as information. It is on every invoice they issue and every company has one; declining to share it is unusual enough to be worth a straight answer before you proceed.

Does an inactive registration mean fraud?

No. It much more often means administrative failure — missed filings, a dormant entity, a restructure. It does mean you are contracting with something other than what you assumed, and the terms should reflect that.

A BrazilCheck report runs these checks against the public registers and returns one document, with the source and retrieval date against every finding. Evidence, not a score.

Check a CNPJ