Technically, you can, within some limit of "recent".

If you have a copy of the UTXO set, you can do a balance check even if you are not online. However, this copy of the UTXO set becomes outdated the moment another block is found, although for many people, being within a couple days is most likely okay.

Even so, with a UTXO set copy, you're looking at something that is on the order of several GB of data, which will have to be downloaded from somewhere at some point in time.

Otherwise, any claims of checking a balance offline is probably a scam.