Is this website a scam? Check any site for free

What the checker looks at

• Our scam and phishing lists. The same lists Web Protection uses to block sites on your Mac: hundreds of thousands of known phishing, malware and fake-shop domains, refreshed every four hours.
• The domain's age. We ask the registry when the name was registered. Most scam shops and phishing pages are days or weeks old; a bank's site is decades old.
• Borrowed brand names. apple-id-verify.top, paypa1.com and аpple.com written with a Cyrillic “а” all try to look like someone else. We compare the address with the brands phishing copies most.
• Other red flags. Link shorteners that hide the real address, free page hosts, a bare IP address, cheap endings scammers favour, an @ in the link, and names that don't point to any server.

How we decide a site is a scam

The lists come from our own open-source project, Yuix-Networks/blocklists on GitHub, which we keep up to date. It is the same code that feeds Web Protection in Tidy My Mac. Every four hours it downloads the lists, checks them and publishes them, and anyone can read which sources it uses and how.

• Phishing, malware and fraud: HaGeZi's Threat Intelligence Feeds, which combine dozens of public threat feeds about phishing pages, malware, command-and-control servers and cryptojacking. More than 350,000 domains.
• Fake shops and scams: HaGeZi's Fake list of fake shops, investment and crypto scams, fake tech support and fake streaming sites. Nearly 19,000 domains.
• A listed domain covers all of its subdomains. If a source fails or suddenly shrinks to less than half its size, the last good copy is kept, so a broken download never switches protection off.

A site that isn't on a list can still get a warning. Each sign has a weight: the strongest are a famous brand's name or a look-alike of it on a domain that doesn't belong to the brand, and a domain registered in the last 30 days. Cheap endings, link shorteners, free page hosts and long hyphenated names weigh less. A domain registered for five years or more, or a well-known company's own domain, counts in the site's favour. A site on our lists is always Dangerous, and so is one with several strong signs.

Found a harmful site that isn't flagged yet? Report it here: confirmed sites are added to Web Protection's lists at their next update. Think a site is listed by mistake? Report it to HaGeZi's lists or write to us at info@tidymymac.com.

Want the story behind this checker and the rest of Tidy My Mac? Read our post on the NameOcean blog.

How to read the result

Dangerous means the site is on one of our lists, or the address is clearly pretending to be a company it isn't. Don't sign in, pay or download anything there. Suspicious and Some warning signs mean the address has traits typical of scams; find out who runs the site before you trust it. No red flags found means nothing we checked is a warning sign, not that the site is guaranteed safe: a scam that went up this morning may not be on any list yet.

Check a shop before you buy

1. Search for the shop's name with the word “scam” or “reviews”, and read what others say on sites the shop doesn't control.
2. Look for a real address, a phone number and a company name in the shop's legal notice or terms, and check that they exist.
3. Be wary of prices far below everywhere else, countdown timers, and payment only by bank transfer, gift card or crypto.
4. Pay by credit card or a service with buyer protection, so you can get your money back.

If you already entered something

Change the password you typed on the real site, and everywhere you use the same one. If you gave card details, call your bank and block the card. If you downloaded something, don't open it, and scan your Mac. Our guide to checking whether your Mac has been hacked walks through every step.