{"id":82390,"date":"2020-02-07T14:56:28","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T22:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/?p=82390"},"modified":"2022-07-26T04:31:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-26T11:31:52","slug":"how-to-tell-if-an-online-article-is-real-fake-or-a-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/how-to-tell-if-an-online-article-is-real-fake-or-a-scam\/","title":{"rendered":"How to tell if an online article is real, fake or a scam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Fake news, scams, and phishing are the plague of our times. It’s getting increasingly difficult to determine which websites are presenting truthful information.\u00a0I’m not just talking about political views; people can disagree about those, and while you may not like what you read on certain sites, that doesn’t mean, as some like to say, “it’s fake news.”<\/p>\n

A\u00a0Stanford University\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0of 7,804 students from middle school through college found that some 82\u00a0percent\u00a0of them\u00a0cannot distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website.\u00a0These findings present a real risk when visiting\u00a0websites you’re not familiar with; and, not just for students, for everyone. How can you know if\u00a0what you’re reading online is telling the truth or trying to scam you either directly\u2014such as by trying to sell you something, or get your personal information\u2014or indirectly, by spreading lies, or by sowing doubt?<\/p>\n

In this article, we offer\u00a0a few tips to help you sort the wheat from the chaff on the Internet. These tips will\u00a0help you determine\u00a0if an online article is real, fake or a scam.<\/p>\n

Do you recognize the publication name?<\/h3>\n

There are publication names you may recognize, and that you can trust \u2014 they may be the major news organizations, such as the New York Times, Forbes or The Wall Street Journal, or even familiar household brands that you know.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0there may be some websites that try to suggest that they belong to a brand. For example, apple-hot-deals.com (this site does not exist, right now) might try to pretend that it’s an Apple website, but it’s most likely not. Most brands don’t use compound domain names in this way, which anyone can register; instead,\u00a0they use URLs such as apple.com\/hotdeals (this also doesn’t exist).<\/p>\n

Here at\u00a0The\u00a0Mac Security Blog<\/strong>, we use the intego.com domain, and the blog is hosted at www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/, proving that it belongs to Intego’s\u00a0domain.<\/p>\n

You can check how long a domain has existed by using a command called “whois.”<\/p>\n

On older versions of macOS, if you were to go to the top level of your Mac’s disk, then navigate to \/System\/Library\/CoreServices\/Applications (or on even older macOS versions, \/Applications\/Utilities), you would find an app called Network Utility. If you then launched the app, you could paste a domain copied from your browser’s address bar, such as intego.com, into the Whois tab:<\/p>\n

\"Whois\"<\/p>\n

Starting with macOS Big Sur, the Network Utility has been deprecated, so you’ll now have to open the Terminal (in \/Applications\/Utilities) instead, and type “whois” followed by a space, then paste the copied domain.<\/p>\n

When you run the whois query, you’ll see when the domain was first registered (in Intego’s case, the Creation Date is in 1997), which can serve as evidence of how long the company has been around.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a guarantee that a site hasn’t transferred ownership since it was first registered, nor does it indicate whether a site may have been hacked, but seeing how long ago a domain was registered can be a basic step toward confirming a site’s possible legitimacy. Scam sites often, though not always, use recently registered domains.<\/p>\n

Is the information from a secure site?<\/h3>\n

Most websites should be secure these days. Look in the address bar of your browser, and you should see a padlock. This means that the connection to the intego.com website (for example) is secure, using HTTPS. The intego.com domain has a TLS\/SSL certificate, which helps ensure that when you type intego.com, your browser is showing you information served by Intego (as opposed to a theoretical man-in-the-middle attacker).<\/p>\n

\"www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/\"<\/p>\n

This said, anyone can purchase an SSL certificate for any domain they own, but the lack of HTTPS security is something to be wary of. (RELATED: 6 Cyber Security Tips to Ensure a Website is Secure.)<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Are you able to contact the site owner or company?<\/h3>\n

Legitimate websites nearly always have a Contact section featuring an email address, a form, or some other way to get in touch with the site’s maintainers. Most business sites should also have one or more postal addresses of offices, and a phone number. Again, this isn’t hard and fast proof of legitimacy, but if you try to contact the company and find that a real person replies, this can at least help you confirm that someone is vouching for it.<\/p>\n

Businesses in the United States may show up on the Better Business Bureau<\/a> website. You won’t find every business there, but you will find reviews for some businesses.<\/p>\n

Did you\u00a0run a\u00a0search on it?<\/h3>\n

You can check most search engines to find information on just about anything, and you might want to try searching for a company or publication that runs the site you’re curious about. You should see their own domain near the top of the list, but one way to see how much of a footprint a company has is to search for links to a company from other sites.<\/p>\n

Google used to have a link: search operator, so if you searched for link:intego.com you would get more than 400,000 results of links to pages on the Intego website. Unfortunately, Google killed off the link: operator<\/a> in 2017. Instead, you can try just searching for the domain or company name whose reputation you’re trying to establish.<\/p>\n

\"link:intego.com\"

Google used to have a link: search operator to help identify authoritative sites that linked back to a domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Have you checked the spelling\u00a0within the article?<\/h3>\n

Yes, anyone can make miskates<\/em> and end up with tyops<\/em> on a wesbite<\/em>, and anyone can run a spell checker, but scam sites are often set up by people whose native language is not English (or the language of the site you’re visiting), and poor language can be a clue that something is amiss. Similarly, you may also find look-alike characters where you would expect to see English alphabet letters.<\/p>\n

Some scammy pages generate their content by scraping text from a legitimate site, and using automated methods to swap out some words from the original with synonyms. Scam pages presumably do this in hopes that search engines won’t punish them with lower search engine rankings for blatantly plagiarizing content from a more popular site. However, this robotic word-swapping often results in awkward sentences that don’t always make sense. If you’ve ever used a thesaurus, you’ll understand why; not every listed synonym for a word is necessarily a perfect fit in every circumstance.<\/p>\n

Did you\u00a0fact-check the story?<\/h3>\n

You can generally trust the more authoritative websites to be honest and accurate, especially if they routinely offer corrections to address errors when they find them. The established newspapers, the well-known magazines, and the TV networks that have been around for a long time have traditionally been fairly trustworthy when it comes to reporting facts (at least when it comes to non-partisan, widely agreed-upon topics). That said, don’t assume that everything you read, even from known sites, is truthful information; fact-check it first.<\/p>\n

Fact-checking a story isn’t always easy, but some topics can be checked on sites like Snopes<\/a>. This independent fact-checking website roots out bogus ideas and gives clear evidence for its findings. These days, Snopes covers a lot of politics and policy (with a left-leaning bias), but one recent article asks, Is This a Picture of a Snake Found in a Milk Jug<\/a>? (Spoiler: it’s Photoshopped.) Historically, Snopes has been a good way to find out if those forwarded e-mails or memes that spread on social media are true or not.<\/p>\n

While fact-checking a story sounds simple enough, a 2016 Rasmussen poll<\/a> found that 62 percent of American voters believed fact checkers are biased. James Taranto, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, actually tweeted that fact-checking “is opinion journalism pretending to be some sort of heightened objectivity.”<\/p>\n

\n

"Fact checking" is opinion journalism pretending to some sort of heightened objectivity. Very bad for journalism. https:\/\/t.co\/LqojbRrN8Z<\/a><\/p>\n

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) September 25, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n