Don’t click, think twice: How to spot a fake website
It’s easy for scamsters to create a website that impersonates the real website and trick people into sharing confidential information. Here are a few tips to identify a fake website.
If you notice numerous language and grammar errors, you must question the reliability of the website. (File Photo/Pixabay) Last month, the Supreme Court issued an advisory about a fake website impersonating the official website of the top court, trying to steal personal details of users. The registry said it was a “phishing attack” and advised people “not to share and divulge any personal and confidential information.”
The incident shows that no website is safe from being targetted by scammers. So in order to protect yourself, it is important to know how to spot a fake, fraudulent website. Here are some of the points to keep in mind before you click on a URL.
Study the address bar
The address bar is on the top of the browser. Observe if the link of the website starts with, ‘https’, where the ‘s’ stands for ‘secure’. However, do not entirely rely on this since, unfortunately, the scammers can spoof security protocol. Also check for misspellings in the URL, for example, ‘amazon’ could be spelt as ‘amaz0n’. It is also important to check the domain extension (.com or .net or .org etc).
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