Scamadviser Algorithm Explainer

Domain Trust Ratings: A User Guide 

This guide explains the ScamAdviser’s domain trust rating system, which helps you assess a website's trustworthiness. The system assigns scores from 1 to 100, with a higher score indicating that the website is more likely to be safe and reliable. 

 
Rating Scale 

1 to 20 - Very likely Unsafe: Websites in this range have a high risk of being malicious or untrustworthy. They may contain malware, phishing and scams. Please exercise extreme caution and avoid entering any personal information. 

21 to 40 -  Likely Unsafe: Although less risky than the previous category, you should still be careful with websites in this category. They may contain questionable offerings or practices, so be careful when downloading files or carrying out transactions. 

41 to 60 - Caution Recommended: Websites in this category are not considered particularly safe or dangerous. Further research may be necessary before relying on it.  

61 to 80 - Likely Safe: Websites with scores in this range are generally considered okay. They do not have a bad reputation. Caution is always advised, however, especially when you need to provide sensitive (payment) information. 

81 to 100 - Very Likely Safe: Websites at this top level are considered very reliable and trustworthy. They usually belong to recognized organizations or established companies.  

Important to Note

Disclaimer: We strongly recommend to always do your own check as well and to not rely only on our Trust Score. Domain trust scores are only estimates. While they provide valuable information, they should not be the only factor when evaluating a website.  
Ratings can change: A website's trust rating can improve or worsen depending on additional information found about the domain. 

Adding and Subtracting: Counting Our Way to the Trust Score

Fighting online scams is a 24/7 job, and we couldn’t hope to do it without the help of the ScamAdviser algorithm.

The algorithm is simply a set of rules and indicators that our systems follow to check on any website you type into our handy search bar. This enables us to give you a simple and easy-to-understand ‘Trust Score’ (as a percentage) within seconds.

While we can’t reveal everything about the analysis behind the scenes (otherwise, the scammers would know too!), we hope to give you enough of an idea of how the Trust Score is generated for any given website.

The core principle of our Trust Score is that it is based on positive and negative indicators. Certain factors will increase a website’s score, whilst others will decrease it. The Trust Score is decided by taking all the relevant factors into account! Keep in mind that the Trust Score is dynamic and can change over time as new data is gathered, such as changes in the website's content and infrastructure or new user reviews.

If you are a website owner, you can view the 'Positive Highlight' and 'Negative Highlights' on the Trust Score page to know why your website has been awarded a certain Trust Score.

The Positive Indicators

Popularity

A website's Tranco Rank is a reliable indicator of its popularity based on the volume of visitors it receives in a given time frame. A website's popularity can be a key indicator of its reliability.

If a website has a lot of visitors, it can often mean that it offers users engaging and credible information/products/services. A [potential scam] website that is very new, has a terrible presentation or is full of harmful ads, which will lower this ranking as users will not be going there very often.

Social Media Activity

Websites know that they can live and die based on their social media engagement. Most businesses recognise that this cheap, global communication channel is vital to success. So, they often use their social media accounts to push their products and offers, respond to consumers, and create buzz.

Scam websites are often not too bothered by this, as maintaining social media pages takes effort and resources. Therefore, the ScamAdviser algorithm can check if a site has active social media accounts and adjust the Trust Score accordingly.

Positive Reviews

Consumers want to voice their opinions on great websites. Whether it's great service, great prices or exclusive deals, consumers want to reward a great experience with a positive review. So, it’s a no-brainer for ScamAdviser to use this source of consumer knowledge in our Trust Score.

We consider reviews on ScamAdviser.com and other popular review platforms such as TrustPilot, SiteJabber, and Web Of Trust. If consumers are happy with a website, we’ll consider this when calculating the Trust Score!

Performance of the Website

The speed and technical proficiency of a website are crucial for many reasons. First, website owners want their websites to be as slick as possible. This also affects a website's Google ranking.

Scammers often have different priorities. They spend time and effort directing users to their sites through spam, fake advertisements, and malware, which can lead to sloppy, inefficient websites. Our algorithm considers this and will reduce the Trust Score based on poor performance in this area.

Security of the Website

Notice that little padlock on the address bar? That means the website has HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which provides an added layer of security when you and the website communicate over the Internet. Other technical methods a website can use to add security to your browsing experience exist. But these often cost time and resources and will be checked by a third party…all things scammers don’t want to happen.

Our algorithm peeks into the website and verifies the level of security, deciding the score based on what they find!

The Negative Indicators

Based in a High-risk Country

This is often a highly debated point regarding our Trust Score rating. Certain scam activities have patterns related to the geographical location of the particular website. This does not mean that we blindly reduce the Trust Score of sites from any specific region. The algorithm also considers the factors mentioned here to evaluate whether the website is suspicious and whether to reduce the Trust Score.

Website Ownership

Website creators often have to note certain details about themselves - such as name, company name and contact details - when registering the domain name. However, there are methods to disguise the identity of the owners, such as the paid Privacy Protection service offered by many domain registrars (nowadays included as a 'free' value-add by some domain registrars). The domain registrant's identity could be purposely hidden for legitimate reasons, such as avoiding marketing spam, but it is also used by scammers trying to evade being caught.

Genuine businesses usually have nothing to hide and do not hide their company data from the registration. Therefore, we consider this indicator and other factors to evaluate if the Trust Score should be lowered.

Age of the Website

Scam sites are usually run as 'hit-and-run' operations, meaning that the site is created to be quickly shut down by the owners after scamming many customers. Rarely do we see a scam site operating for more than three to six months. Scam sites don’t have a long shelf life as the sites get shut down within weeks by the owners themselves or due to other reasons such as users complaining, the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) or search engines blacklisting them, etc. 

Scammers know this very well and will set up new scam sites rapidly. ScamAdviser’s Trust Score considers this and will check the age of an online store. If we can see that, alongside other scam indicators, a website that has not been active for a long time will have a lower Trust Score. As the website’s age increases, so will the Trust Score, assuming no other negative indicators exist. 

High-risk Server

Every website has to live somewhere; that home is called a server. But servers often don’t have just one website on them. Scammers often pick hosts who do not mind questionable content, which means that these server hosts have a lot of less reliable content.

Our Trust Score can see the big picture and track the scam sites clustered on one host. The algorithm can then reduce the Trust core of future sites that decide to make those high-risk servers their home.

Ecommerce Platforms

Platforms such as Shopify and its Chinese counterpart, Shoplazza, make it easy for small businesses to set up shop online. However, scammers exploit the ease of creating websites provided by these platforms to create a large number of fake stores quickly. Our algorithms take this fact into consideration and use it to determine the Trust Score.

And More…
Of course, our algorithm is complex and constantly evolving. These are just some factors that are at play when our algorithm assesses a website. We can’t give everything away here; otherwise, the scammers will catch on!

Be safe knowing that we never ‘sit on our hands’. As scammers adapt, so do we, all to protect our users. Stay safe, and don’t forget to check ScamAdviser Before You Buy!