We expose internet scammers. Thoughts towards uniqueness.

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Search by images​

If there are photos on the site, at least one must be checked through a photo search from Yandex or Google. Yandex searches better. To do this, download the photo from the site, and then upload it using one of the above links. If the source of the photo is not found, use the second link search.

If you have not found the source of the photos, this does not mean that you are not dealing with scammers. The most sophisticated ones use photos that are not available on the Internet, or even generate new faces using recently launched services.

Search not only for faces, but also for photos of the office and products. Often this is a photomontage.

Domain age​

Check when the domain was registered on the website - who.is. Scammers often have domains that are less than a year old. However, a long period from the moment of registration is not a guarantee of good faith, because you can simply buy a domain on the secondary market.

“Scammers” usually lie about long-term work. On the website - WayBack Machine (web.archive.org) you can see what the first page of a particular site looked like in different years.

Also look at the search history for the company name in Yandex. If the requests appeared recently, she is lying about her vast experience. If a company declares that it is international, you can use the Google Trends service to analyze queries by its name .

Licenses​

If we are talking about financial services, we strongly advise you not to contact organizations that do not have a license obtained from the regulator of your country. For Russia this is the Central Bank, for Ukraine - the NBU , etc.

Registrations and licenses from different island jurisdictions are a direct path to losing money, despite the fact that even such licenses can be fake or scammers can take the name of a real company that has a license. You can check whether the specified license exists in nature on the websites of financial regulators: Bank of Russia, CySEC (Cyprus), FCA (UK) and other regulators.

No legal entity or nominee director​

Lazy swindlers don’t even create a legend for their “business” in the form of a legal entity. This is a sign of obvious fraud. But lately, scammers often indicate the details of a legal entity that has nothing to do with them. As a rule, “dormant legal entities” are selected that do not conduct business and do not have their own website, with a name suitable for a particular scam.

Some scammers register a legal entity in Russia so that they can be trusted. A legal entity must have a general director. In the case of scammers, this is usually a denomination, a drop, for example, a drunkard who is ready to put his signature on documents for a small amount. Therefore, if you cannot find the CEO’s persona in media news, social networks and other sources, do not contact the organization . This is a sign that the real organizers want to evade responsibility.

However, well-prepared “scammers” generously purchase mentions in the media and on other sites.

Lack of photographs, names and biographies of management​

If you work with other people's money, this data must be provided. Although their presence does not protect against losing money (examples are Arthur Vardanyan at Cashbury, Eric Gafarov at Gafarov & Partners, Kirill Doronin at Finiko), their absence is a sure sign of fraud.

Example: many consumer credit cooperatives (CCCs) hide who is really behind the collection of money.

Phone number​

To create trust, scammers use Russian phone numbers, even if they are abroad. This is easy to do by renting a number and using IP telephony.

Try the phone number in the search, perhaps it already has negative reviews on sites such as zvonili.com, neberitrubku.ru.

Reviews: honest and fake​

Modern scammers have learned to work with Yandex and Googe search results and fill it with positive, fake reviews about their work. This is done so that honest reviews appear as low as possible in search results. To do this, scammers deceive Google, carry out DDOS attacks, artificially increase the failure rate in Yandex, create pseudo review sites, and bribe review sites to remove negativity.

Don't rely on positive reviews. Just skip them. Real people, if they are satisfied, as a rule, do not leave reviews on financial services, believing that this area is confidential. If you see a lot of positive reviews, this is almost a guarantee that you are dealing with scammers.

Use resources such as “Trust on the Web” and the browser extension from the Web of trust project (Chrome, Firefox, Opera). Trust more trusted resources, such as reviews on Google, reviews on Yandex, reviews on Otzovik. There, as a rule, they don’t delete negative reviews, but they don’t delete fake positive ones either.

Regulator blacklist:​

The regulator's blacklist daily identifies fraudulent financial pyramid organizations.

Details​

Over time (every other day) you will learn to identify scammers at first glance.

So, their websites contain

• frankly inflated figures, not supported by anything;
• Term of the work;
• number of clients;
• volume of transactions;
• There are almost never financial statements, and if there are, they are falsified;
• There are many loud phrases that can impress that part of the population that does not have critical abilities;
• Scammers constantly list well-known brands as partners.

Another sign of scammers: some of the text information is placed in such a way that it cannot be copied, and it does not end up in search engines. This is done to make it more difficult to expose scammers. For example, this is how all information about a legal entity and jurisdiction is provided. Texts on different websites of the same group of scammers repeat each other. Due to negative reviews, scammers are increasingly forced to move from site to site.