Checking a financial company's website: domain age
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An important step when choosing a broker or investment fund is checking the website. If you analyze the indicators correctly, you can catch the company falsifying its length of service, number of clients and working capital. If you make sure there are no clone sites, you can discard the 100% sign of impending fraud.
Attention! The article talks about checking financial companies, but the information provided will be useful for assessing any site where you are going to buy something.
Financial companies, as a rule, report their length of service in several ways. They record the period of their work in the “basement” (the very bottom) of the site. In a separate section, they tell the history of their activities: how it all started and what they are working on this year. Checking the domain name can clarify the company's length of service and the veracity of its legend. Many brokers and investment funds share their statistics. The number of clients and completed transactions, the volume of working capital, etc. They present this data in an interactive format on the main page or publish official documents in a special section. Comparison of site traffic statistics and the stated figures can reveal the lie.
There are many clone sites on the Internet that belong to fraudulent organizations. Therefore, it is important to check the sites for originality. If the resource is partially or completely copied, this is a sure sign of an impending scam. Duplicate sites are used only by scammers.
So, the required time: checking the site data takes 5-10 minutes. Searching for clones is another 2-3 minutes. Cost: the services that are offered for use are free.
How to check the age of a domain
Let's start with the main thing: the longer the company's experience, the better. The indicator for a broker or fund is 10+ years of customer service and a full online/offline presence. One could advise that you should not waste time checking the websites of popular brands. However, scammers use the word "Alpha" and the BNP Paribas logo so often that checking the domain address will never be superfluous.
To clarify the age of the site, you need to go to any Whois site. These are services that allow you to get useful information about domains. A popular tool in RuNet is called Site Spy. However, it is very limited: it shows the date of domain registration and its age. This is not enough.
To really understand how long the broker's or fund's website has been operating, you should go to DomainBigData, Domaintools or similar services. They all function the same way: the user inserts the domain of the site he wants to check into the search bar and clicks Search.
- the name of the domain owner, not the phrase “Protected,” which makes the owner anonymous;
- the date of domain registration, which corresponds to the company's stated length of service;
- no recent date of renewal of rights to the address;
- the country where the servers are located, which corresponds to the geography of the services provided.
Whois data should be supported by searching for brand mentions in Google (you won’t be able to dig that deep in Yandex). Why search for mentions? It’s possible that the company was developing on one domain, then lost it and registered a new one.
How to search for mentions in Google? Go to the search engine’s website, enter the name of the company you’re interested in, and click the “Search” button. Then, in the search results, click “Tools” and specify the time range. For example, 2010-2011.
It’s important not just to find the same company name, but to make sure that this is the same company you’re interested in. It’s worth reading reviews or media materials.
