Is this website a scam? How to check any site in 2 minutes

"Is this website a scam?" is usually asked with a cart already full. The good news: most fake shops fail a short, boring check. This is the routine we would run on any store we had never heard of. Two minutes, no account, no tools you have to install.

Step 1: Read the address bar, slowly

Look at the domain, not the page. Scammers rent a domain that looks like a brand you know and put a polished shop on it. Check the spelling letter by letter (adidas-outlet-us.shop is not Adidas), and be wary of odd endings such as .shop, .top, .xyz or .store combined with a famous brand name.

The padlock means the connection is encrypted. It says nothing about who is on the other end. Fake shops have padlocks too, because certificates are free.

Step 2: Find out how old the domain is

This is the single strongest signal. Real shops accumulate history; scam shops are created, used for a few weeks, and dropped. Search "whois" plus the domain, or use any WHOIS lookup, and read the creation date.

• Registered in the last few months and selling branded goods at a discount: leave.
• Under a year old: possible, but every other step now has to pass.
• Several years old: a good sign, not a guarantee. Aged domains get bought and reused.

Step 3: Find the company behind the shop

A real store tells you who runs it: a legal name, a physical address, a company registration number, and a way to reach a person. Open the "About" and "Contact" pages and look for all four. A contact form with no address, a free webmail address, or an address that turns out to be a parcel locker are the classic gaps.

If there is a registration number, check it in the official register for that country. If the company exists but sells something unrelated, or was set up last month, treat the shop as unverified.

Step 4: Check how they want to be paid

Go to the checkout without buying and look at the payment options. Card payments and PayPal give you a route to get money back. Bank transfer, cryptocurrency, gift cards, or "friends and family" transfers do not. A shop that only accepts the second group has chosen methods you cannot reverse. That choice tells you what you need to know.

Step 5: Compare the price with the market

Search the exact product name and look at what established retailers charge. Sixty or seventy percent off a current model of a known brand is not a deal; it is bait. Margins on real branded goods do not stretch that far, and genuine clearance sales happen on the brand's own site or at retailers you already know.

Step 6: Read reviews somewhere the shop does not control

Search the shop's name together with "scam", "reviews" and "not delivered". Ignore the testimonials on the site itself. On review platforms, watch the pattern rather than the score: a wall of five-star reviews posted in the same week, all in the same tone, is a fabricated wall, and it usually sits on top of a handful of one-star reviews that say "never arrived". We wrote a separate guide on how to spot fake reviews.

Step 7: Paste it into a checker

A checker does steps 1, 2, 3 and 6 for you in one go and shows its sources. Paste the store link into the HasTrust scam checker and you get a trust score, the domain age, company-register lookups, lookalike-domain detection and any fraud reports we found, plus a plain "buy" or "skip" bottom line. Read how the score works before you rely on it, and treat any tool as one more source, not a verdict. If the checker and your own two minutes disagree, trust the red flag.

Signs that end the check immediately

• A countdown timer or "only 2 left" on every product.
• Prices far below any established retailer for current, branded stock.
• Bank transfer, crypto or gift cards as the only way to pay.
• No company name and no physical address anywhere on the site.
• Product photos that appear on other shops under different names (a reverse image search shows this in seconds).
• A domain registered weeks ago.

Still unsure, but the shop passed?

Buy something small first, pay by card or PayPal, and screenshot the product page, the price and the order confirmation. Real shops survive that test without noticing. Fake ones show themselves on the first order.

If you already paid

Act the same day. Card and PayPal payments can be disputed, bank transfers can sometimes be recalled if you are fast, and reporting the shop helps the next person. The steps, deadlines and template letters are in our guide on what to do after paying a scam webshop.