Scam websites are any illegitimate domains and web pages created to steal your money, or personal information, or infect your device with malware. Scam sites can look like many different things – a no-name shop with ridiculously cheap goods, or a real company with millions of daily users. Creating a website scam is a form of fraudulent and malicious activity that most hackers and scammers practice. It’s relatively cheap, and copying the content of a legitimate site is not difficult either.

A more diligent scammer may even use pharming techniques to redirect legitimate websites to the fraudster’s fake version. Once you land on a fake page, how the website scam works depends on the type of scam. Some fake websites imitate a login or payment page of a well-known company or brand, so you feel like it’s the real thing and provide your credentials. Other fraudulent websites try to scare you into downloading malware by warning about viruses on your device and offering software to solve the problem. A website scam can also look like a typical online store, except when you order goods, the scammers run away with your money, and no delivery ever arrives.

There are different types of scams online, and scam sites also come in different shapes and sizes. Each scam website type has distinctive features that could serve as a red flag for spotting them. Phishing websites are one type of phishing attack. Fraudsters distribute the links to these websites via email and fake everything from the sender to every part of the website they pose as. Everything but a trivial nuance in the URL makes it look like a real company, usually one with lots of customers, such as Amazon or PayPal.

Fake e-shops look like real e-commerce sites, except they don’t sell anything. They promise you goods or services with discounts or vouchers that sound too good to be true. You add items to the cart, go to the payment page, and submit your payment information. Scammers get your payment card details like the CVV code, while you wait for items that never arrive and find suspicious purchases on your next bank account statement. Along with the fake online stores, you can find pages that pretend to sell tickets, usually way cheaper than the legitimate seller. In case of ticket fraud, you may even receive a ticket. But it won’t grant you entrance anywhere because the ticket will be as fake as the Website Scam Checker.