Imagine you want to find the best place for your savings or the best place to invest a windfall or the best pension scheme available, for example.
You might go to a professional financial advisor or to your bank or other finance organisation you know.
But if you don’t have the money for an advisor then it might be a case of asking friends and relatives for their opinions or just using a search engine.
However, when you get to searching online, there is a huge number of finance organisations online and many criminals create fake websites that sometimes look exactly like the ones for genuine businesses.
Q. How do you tell which websites are genuine and which are fake?
The starting point is to ignore unsolicited emails, text messages, calls etc. – these are very likely to be fake and should be ignored.
Things to Look For
- Check the message and website looking for mistakes
- Correct URL e.g. Barclays Bank rather than Baclays Bank
- Use of broken English
- Simple spelling mistakes or serious grammatical errors
- The content on the website doesn’t make sense
- Pictures, diagrams etc. that fit in with the rest of the site and haven’t just been added at random to fill space.
2. Open the Google Transparency Report webpage.
https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?hl=en_GB
Click the “Search by URL” field in the middle of the page and type in the Internet address for the website you want to check. Google will tell you if it can find anything dodgy about the website.
- Check the company on the Companies House website at https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company
- Check for reviews online about the business and check anti-scam websites
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