How We Score a Website
Our trust rating is an informed opinion, produced by weighing several signals about a website — not a guarantee, and not a verdict on the people behind it. This page explains, in plain English, what we look at and, just as importantly, what a tool like ours can and cannot know.
We think you deserve to see how a rating is reached rather than being asked to trust a number on faith. So here is the honest version. No single fact decides whether a site is trustworthy; instead we gather a handful of independent signals, weigh them together, and summarise the picture in language anyone can act on. A genuine business tends to score well across the board, while a scam usually falls down on two or three signals at once. Below is what goes into that assessment.
The signals we weigh
Domain age and registration
How long a site's address has existed is one of the most reliable signals there is. A domain registered recently has had no time to build a track record or attract scrutiny, and a very new address behind a "long-established, trusted" story is a classic mismatch. We look at the registration date and public ownership details, drawn from WHOIS records, and read them in context — a new domain is a reason to look harder, never a conviction on its own.
Hosting and infrastructure
Where and how a site is hosted adds another layer. Throwaway scam sites often share tell-tale infrastructure, appear and vanish quickly, or sit alongside other flagged domains. None of this is decisive by itself, but patterns in the plumbing behind a site can corroborate or soften what the other signals suggest.
Reviews and independent reputation
What other people have found matters more than anything a site says about itself. We look for independent reputation — reviews, mentions and reports that live somewhere other than the site's own pages — while staying alert to manufactured feedback. A wall of identical five-star reviews posted in a single burst is itself a warning, not a reassurance, and we treat it accordingly.
Technical signals
We take account of the technical fingerprints a site leaves — the kind of thing that is easy to overlook by eye. An encryption certificate is basic hygiene rather than proof of honesty, so its presence counts for little on its own; the more useful technical markers are the ones that recur across known scam sites. These signals help flag the throwaway and the hastily assembled, and they are the part of the job automation genuinely does faster than a person.
Reputation and reports
Finally, we factor in whether a site already carries a reputation for trouble — appearances on scam reports, complaints, and the accumulated record that a longer-lived, accountable business builds up and a fresh fraud simply has not. Taken together, these signals form a trust score that is meant to inform your decision, not make it for you.
How the signals combine
The reason we weigh several signals rather than relying on one is that any single measure can mislead. An aged domain can be bought and repurposed; a padlock can be added in minutes; a handful of reviews can be bought. It is the agreement — or the disagreement — between signals that carries the real information. When a site's story and its evidence pull in different directions, that tension is usually the most honest thing about it, and our rating is built to surface it rather than smooth it over.
What automation can and cannot do
We want to be straight about the limits, because over-promising is its own kind of scam. A tool can gather facts quickly and spot patterns across millions of sites, and that is genuinely useful. What it cannot do is read intention, understand the particular deal in front of you, or judge a phone call, a relationship or a feeling. It weighs where a link leads, not what a stranger means by it. A high rating is not a promise that a purchase will go well, and a low one is not an accusation against a named person — both are probabilistic readings of public signals, and both can be wrong. Treat any rating as a well-informed second opinion that supports your own judgement, never as a substitute for it.
A note on where this stands
The CheckAScam website checker is still being built. This page describes the methodology it is designed around so that the reasoning is public from the start; as the checker ships and improves, we will keep this explanation in step with what it actually does. In the meantime, the habits in our guides — reading the address, checking a site's age, paying by a method you can reverse — do most of the same work by hand, and they will always be worth keeping even once a tool can help.
If you spot a rating you believe is wrong, tell us at [email protected]. We would rather hear about it and look again than leave a mistaken impression standing.