Last updated: July 16, 2022
Do you think you know everything about internet scams? Think again ! More than one and a half million French people are victims of internet scams each year. And that without counting those who do not dare to talk about it.
The site internet-signalement.gouv.fr allows you to report them, or even get advice on how to solve certain problems, but it would be even better not to be fooled, right?
So, how to verify a website and protect yourself against online scams ?
The French Cyberscore project
In order for Internet users to be able to know the security and reliability of the sites they visit, the French government has just ratified in parliament the creation of a new tool: baptized Cyberscore.
Like the Nutriscore for food products, Cyberscore aims to define the level of security of digital platforms, messaging services and merchant sites.
However, this system will not come into force until October 2023. And of course, you will not wait until 2023 to validate the sites you visit.
What to do then? Fortunately, you have a choice between labels, community sites and browser extensions.
Here is 5 tools that can help you verify a merchant site.
Google Information Transparency
Who better than the internet giant to verify the security of a website. Billions of URLs are scanned daily to detect suspicious websites, including thousands of new dubious sites every day, including many legitimate websites that have been infected.
You can search to see if a particular website is dangerous. Be careful, however: it will inform you of the malicious potential of a link. But it won't tell you anything about its commercial reliability.
Link: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsin/search/
Captain Drop
Captain Drop is a platform that helps you save money by finding the product you want at the best price.
Instead of paying four times the price for products from China, Captain Drop checks the sites and tells you where you can find the same products but strangely for much less.
It is available online or through a mobile phone app.
Link: captaindrop.com
WOT
Web of Trust (WOT) is a free tool that determines whether a site is potentially dangerous or not. It takes the form of a web browser extension that uses symbols to indicate trusted sites where you can buy without any risk. This symbol takes the form of a circle whose color ranges from green (reliable) to red (dangerous).
Thanks to a very active community of users, many sites are rated and deemed reliable, unreliable or dangerous. WOT thus saves considerable time for Internet users who are looking for online reviews.
Link: www.mywot.com
To learn how to use the WOT extension, watch this article: Check if a site is reliable before accessing it
France Verif
France Verif analyzes many elements of a site for you: physical address, legal notices, technologies used or even popularity.
It relies on 127 different evaluation criteria, for a fairly comprehensive look. small bonus, there is an extension on most browsers!
Link: franceverif.fr
VirusTotal
VirusTotal is an online tool belonging to Google (Alphabe) that allows the analysis of websites and facilitates the rapid detection of all kinds of malware.
Virus Total relies on the analysis of dozens of the best known or most specialized cybersecurity solutions. Among them, you will find in particular Kaspersky or BitDefender, which can be quite reassuring.
To do this, go to the URL tab of Virus Total and launch the analysis of the site on which you have doubts.
Link: virustotal.com
How to avoid pitfalls?
There are many other tools to detect a fraudulent website, impossible to list them all here; on the other hand we can give you some indicators of reliability of a website which are not deceiving:
- An unsecured merchant site with an SSL certificate.
- Internal and external links that do not work.
- The absence of general conditions of sale and / or legal notices.
- A URL that does not match that of the brands.
- The presence of many spelling errors.
- Much lower prices than the competition.
- Negative reviews about Trustpilot.