What this tutorial says in five lines
- Domain age is the single fastest filter — most fraud sites are months old.
- Perfect English on a landing page means nothing; the checkout tells you more.
- Check the company from outside the site, never through links it provides.
- A payment page that only accepts crypto or gift cards is a closing signal.
- The absence of any negative review anywhere is itself suspicious.
Why this matters
You do not need to be technical to check a website. You need a fixed order of questions, so that you are not making a fresh judgement each time under the pressure of a deadline the site invented. This routine takes about five minutes and uses nothing but a browser and a search engine.
The five-minute order of operations
Run these in sequence and stop at the first hard failure. The order is deliberate: the cheapest, most decisive checks come first.
| Order | Check | Cost | Decisive when |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Domain age and registrar | 30 seconds | Registered within the last year — extremely common in fraud |
| 2nd | Company identity and registration | 1 minute | No company exists, or the number belongs to a different business |
| 3rd | The company checked from outside their site | 1 minute | Nothing exists about them except their own pages |
| 4th | Payment methods offered | 30 seconds | Crypto-only, gift card, or direct transfer to a person |
| 5th | Independent reviews and complaints | 1 minute | A pattern of unanswered withdrawals, not a single complaint |
| 6th | Terms and contact reality | 1 minute | No address, no phone that answers, a contact form that never replies |
The signals that actually predict fraud
Not all warnings are equally useful. Some are cosmetic and some are structural. The structural ones are what you should weigh, because they are expensive for a fraud to fake and cheap for you to verify.
How strongly each signal predicts a fraudulent site
Relative predictive strength in published consumer-protection analyses
Reading: Note the bottom row. Spelling is the signal people rely on most and it is the weakest — professional fraud operations use professional copywriters. Weight the structural signals instead.
Reading a domain like an investigator
Most lookalike domains are caught by two habits: reading the whole string, and checking the registration date.
- 01Read the domain from the right: the part immediately before the final dot is the actual owner. "paypal.secure-login.com" is owned by secure-login.com, not by PayPal.
- 02Look for character substitutions: doubled letters, rn for m, a zero for an O, hyphens inserted to make a wrong name read correctly.
- 03Check the registration date. A brand-new domain presenting itself as an established business is the most common structural failure.
- 04Check the privacy setting — legitimate small businesses do use privacy shields, so treat this as a supporting signal rather than a verdict.
- 05Check the certificate details if you want one more data point: a free auto-issued certificate tells you nothing about the operator.
The padlock means the connection is encrypted, not that the company is honest. Every fraud site has one.
Where the money goes, by method
The payment method is the most honest part of a fraud site, because it reveals the recovery route available to you. This is worth understanding before you pay, not after.
| Method | What it tells you | Recovery route |
|---|---|---|
| Credit or debit card | Normal commerce, but no proof of honesty | Strongest route — chargeback rights exist with real deadlines |
| Bank transfer to a company | Plausible for large purchases | Weak but real — recall is sometimes possible if reported within hours |
| Bank transfer to a person | Almost no legitimate business does this | Very weak — the money is a personal transfer, not a commercial payment |
| Crypto | Frequently used because it is final and irreversible | Effectively none directly; evidence-based reporting only |
| Gift cards | No legitimate business accepts them as payment | Almost none — the code is spent within minutes |
| Payment app to an individual | Peer-to-peer transfer, not a purchase | Limited, and only if reported very quickly |
Before you pay, and after you pay
A short version you can keep.
- 01Before: verify the company outside the site, confirm the payment method offers you a dispute route, and check the domain age.
- 02Before: if anything requires urgency, treat the urgency itself as information about the seller.
- 03After: if you paid by card and it turns out to be fraud, contact your issuer the same day. Card deadlines are short.
- 04After: preserve everything — the site as it looked, the order confirmation, the addresses, the chat. Websites vanish and evidence with them.
- 05After: report to IC3.gov and ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and to your national consumer body if one exists.
The visual summary
Everything above, reduced to the four stages that matter for this topic. If you only look at one thing on this page, look at this.
Where this fits in the pattern
Before contact
Nothing has happened yet. This is when every tutorial here is most useful and costs you nothing but reading.
During the approach
The script is running. The verification tests in this tutorial are designed to be run here, neutrally, without confrontation.
At the money request
The decisive moment. Any request for funds, fees, taxes or unlock deposits is the end of the script, not a stage of it.
After a loss
Prevention is over; evidence work begins. Preserve, report, and never pay a second fee to recover the first.
Common questions
Build the complaint from what you saved
Enter the details you collected and generate a formal complaint, a cover email and a legal draft you can print or file.
Primary sources and further reading
- FTC — Scams That Follow a Scam consumer.ftc.gov
- FBI — Common Scams and Crimes www.fbi.gov
- CISA — Cybersecurity Best Practices www.cisa.gov
External links open in a new tab so you can verify the underlying material yourself. TrueMoneyTalk is not affiliated with these organisations.
Prevention only works if it reaches people before the contact does.
Disclaimer: this tutorial is general information, not legal, financial or recovery advice, and is not a substitute for advice from a licensed professional in your jurisdiction. Individual outcomes vary and are never guaranteed.