7 ways to check a site for fraud online

Let's look at the best services that will help you find out how to check a site for fraud online.

With their help, you will be able to decide whether the resource is worth using or it is unreliable.

Every year, more than 10,000 different online stores and shopping sites are created on the Internet. Not all of them may be reliable.

As a result, money can easily leak to a scammer, and the average buyer will not be able to prove anything.

It is very easy to encounter fraud on the Internet. Even if the appearance of the site does not arouse suspicion, its creator may turn out to be a thief whose goal is your money. There are a huge number of fraud schemes - from the creation of phishing sites, to fake online stores and mailings with malicious links.

Below we consider the best services for checking sites and provide useful recommendations to help identify the characteristics of a fraudulent resource.

1. WebMoney Advisor.

WebMoney Advisor is a popular service for checking the reliability of the site. He developed the team WebMoney for users of the service. The idea of the scanner - to tell the user whether he can trust a particular site and to transfer their money to the account of the seller.

We recommend to start checking with WebMoney Advisor. In the main window of the site find the text box to enter the address and copy the link to the site into it.

Then click "Find Site" to start the scanning process. A new window will show you information about the resource.

If the site is fraudulent and dangerous to use, you will see the appropriate system message.

Also, you can use the service to see positive and negative reviews, site ranking place and traffic index. If you have scanned the site, but it does not find reviews and shows zero rating, it also indicates the unreliability of the resource.

To automatically scan all the sites you visit, we recommend you install the extension WebMoney Advisor, which is available for browsers Chrome, Opera, Firefox.

WhoIS - check site registration.

WhoIS - a service that allows you to find out in what country the domain is registered, and who is the provider of hosting services. This tool will be useful for those users who have already come across the fact of fraud and want to find the culprit.

Once you know who exactly maintains the site, you will be able to write to the hosting provider and get information about the person who cheated you. Of course, all data will be provided only if you can prove that you have been cheated.

As practice shows, it is quite realistic to identify the person, report him to the police and get the site blocked.

To start using the resource, go to its home page and in the "Domain" enter the address of the site. Click "OK" to confirm.

A new window will show a summary of the domain. You will learn what company has registered the domain name, the date the site was created, the name of the owner, the city and the status of operation.

Also, you will see phone numbers to try to contact the owner of the resource (if he specified a valid number during registration).

3. TrustOrg.com tool.

Trustorg (or "Trust on the Net") is a resource that allows you to determine the level of trust a site on the Internet. With its help you can quickly find out if you should make a purchase from an online store.

"Trust on the Web" shows:

• Domain age;

• IP address location;

• Unique trust rating;

• Site reputation.

The analysis is based on the comprehensive use of reliable verification technologies. In particular, Yandex Catalogue, Web Of Trust, Safe Browsing. Also, users of the resource can see the owner's registered phone numbers and office addresses.

Other people can leave reviews about the use of the website, with which you can determine exactly whether to use the goods and services of the selected resource.

On the home page, enter the website address and click on "Verify Site."

As you can see, the results of the scan for the site shows a negative trust level, indicating fraud. Also, the page shows the age of the domain in days, the location of the site and its description.

4. Find out the reputation of the site on WebOfTrust.

Web of Trust (or WoT) is an international resource for checking sites. Its database contains about a million sites from all popular providers.

Site Controller will protect your computer from viruses, scams, phishing and suspicious software algorithms.

The peculiarity of the resource is that it is designed to work only as an extension for your web browser.

The official site of the service has a link to install the utility to your browser and detailed information about the work and principles of the API, which will be useful for developers.

After clicking the add extension button, you will be redirected to the official browser add-on store.

You can use it to safely install the desired extension. Adding the checking service will start automatically.

The program icon will appear in the browser window. Now the visit of all sites will be controlled by the extension. If the resource is safe - nothing will happen, but if a phishing or scam is detected - the appropriate notification will appear and access to the site will be blocked. At any time the user can disable the add-on.

To view the level of trust, open the desired site, then click on the extension icon and select the "View reputation and comments.

5. Checking website addresses with Dr. Web.

The developers of one of the most popular antiviruses have recently launched a tool to quickly check links to any sites and pages.

The advantage of the online scanner is that it can be used both on a computer and on a mobile device.

The site uses only reliable algorithms that work in the full version of the antivirus as well.

To start scanning, enter the link to the page in the "Check" field and press Enter.

Next you will see a pop-up window with the results of the site:

6. Google Safe Browsing.

Google Safe Browsing is the best extension for Chrome, which allows you to interact with the latest algorithm of safe Internet surfing from Google. To start using the addon, install it using the official add-on store.

To scan it, just go to the site and click on the extension key, which is located on the browser control panel.

Also, you can set up automatic checking of visited resources.

Yandex and FireFox have similar technologies of safe use of the Internet.

7. VirusTotal - universal scanning.

Virus Total is a service that allows you to check files, links, IP addresses or domains for viruses without installing software.

After going to the resource page, you need to select the tab that corresponds to the object to be scanned:

File - for multimedia files and various documents; URL - for links; Search - for information about the address, domain.

Since we need to check the site, let's choose the URL tab. In the text field we need to copy the link to the resource.

In the new window you will see a list of all possible threats and the results of their check:

Practical recommendations.

The site is the face of your company on the Internet. On the site you can see how old the company is and how it presents itself.

Also, on most sites you can read reviews from customers.

It is important to understand that a reliable company will have an exclusively high-quality and thoughtful website, while the owners of fraudulent companies prefer not to invest in their own sites or make them poorly.

Although the above services are able to check the website's traffic, its age, and domain reliability, all of these parameters are abstract and one cannot fully judge the safety of a website based only on the scanning results:

A small age of the site. We cannot rule out the possibility that the company has just recently launched its own resource, since it itself is new. Also, there are cases when the site simply moves to a new domain, so its age is reset; Reviews . If you are sure that the site is reliable because it has only positive reviews, we would recommend checking the resource again. The fact is that the owners of fraudulent sites often fudge positive customer reviews to confuse you. After receiving a negative comment, resources are often deleted and created anew. That's why comments can't always be trusted; Unprotected connection. The browser may automatically determine the connection to the site as unreliable, even if you've previously used the resource and are 100% confident in its honesty. It happens because of the failure of the verification algorithm.

Additional recommendations

As you can see, the use of services to check the site for fraud is not a panacea, which is guaranteed to protect you from fraud.

We recommend to additionally perform the following actions:

Search for reviews on third-party independent sites;

Recommendations of users, which can be found on special resources to check the site, are not always 100% true. The sheer praise of the comments may also indicate tampering.

As a rule, if a user has purchased an item and is satisfied with it, he will not search for special services to check the site for fraud and leave a good comment. But a person who was cheated will always leave a negative feedback.

When you enter the name of a company into the search engine, the results show a box of reviews along with the organization's address, phone number and hours of operation.

A site that sells a real product will have lots of pictures of the products in different angles.

In the description of the product you will find absolutely all the characteristics, composition or other properties of the item. But scammers do not waste their time creating detailed descriptions.

Any self-respecting company has verified pages in social networks. They can be Vkontakte, Facebook, Instagram and other networks.

Check these pages. There other customers often share photos of their products and write reviews.

This way you can get the most objective assessment of the chosen site.

If there are no links to social networks, however, this is quite suspicious, because there is a possibility that the site owner does not want people to evaluate the company and express their opinions.

Contact the managers of the company.

If you or your acquaintances have not previously used the services of the chosen site and there are no reviews on the Internet, you can always try to contact customer service by phone. A reliable company always creates its own call centers.

The number listed in the contact form could not be reached? Most likely, all the numbers and email addresses are fake.

It is also highly recommended never to buy something on a site that is new to you, even if it is well known and has a good level of trust. It is better to make your first purchase by cash on delivery or send money only upon receiving the service.

Conclusion

Before using a new unknown to you online store, bank site or any other site that provides operations with money, we recommend checking the site with all the services mentioned in the article.

It will take a little time, but the risk of getting caught in another online scam will be minimized. Also, do not forget to check the name of the site in search engines and read reviews from independent sources.

Always be vigilant and take into account the fact that suspiciously low prices for products is the first property of all scam sites, so always check the average cost of products or services in other stores.