Desenmascara.me

How to verify whether a website is legitimate or not?: desenmascara.me

lunes, 17 de agosto de 2020

Would you say this website is legitimate or FAKE?

 With desenmascara.me I come across the website as in the picture below:

Fig 1: Section of the main site


The web address is like: https://$brand-boutique-montreal.com ( I have masked the brand purposely )

The domain will expire in 73 days since today as per the 2 pictures below:

Fig 2: Domain tools information about domain 



Fig 3: Information provided by desenmascara.me about the domain


With just the above information would you say such website is legitimate or fake?.

Hint: Nowadays it´s not so easy to differentiate FAKE websites among legitimate ones.


lunes, 3 de agosto de 2020

FBI SEES RISE IN ONLINE SHOPPING SCAMS

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today warned of an increased number of reports coming from victims of online shopping scams. 
This is an increasing fraud since few years ago. In 2017 I wrote the paper "Tracking online counterfeiters" and the above FBI alert just highlight what we already knew a while ago.
With the desenmascara.me service I usually receive complains of users who have been lured online. The last example, I have this email in my inbox:

Usually the tips I give to users who write me are:
  1. Fill in a complaint into the nearest LEA office. Also if you are US based you can fill in a complain online here. If you are based in Europe, you can report it here.
  2. Before making any purchase online, verify into https://desenmascara.me the website you are in front of. Still in doubts, you can just ask us.

In the above case, when I tried to analyze the website warned by the user, I noticed that the website had just been analyzed (minutes ago) into desenmascara.me and to my surprise, it was automatically flagged as "Fraudulent!!"



Therefore, my advice to anyone online, before making any purchase online, you can either try to follow all the "FBI tips to avoid being victimized" or simply just type the web address of the website into https://desenmascara.me and in a few seconds you will know whether is fraudulent or not.