Fake websites that try to imitate real ones can sometimes be easy to spot and other times not so easy if you are unsure what to look for. A website that want to imitate https://www.amazon.com might use something similar like, http://ww.amzon.com . You may be able to spot the differences right away, but some may not be able to. The real website should always use https. This is how you can verify if your session is secured. Websites that participate in ecommerce should always use a secure socket connection. Second, the website is misspelled. Although it is just one character, it should be a giveaway that the site is fake.

Something else to pay attention to is the domain. If you want to visit the website https://citi.com but you receive a link in your email that looks like https://citi.co . As you can see the domains are different as one is a .com which is commercial and the other .co which is for Columbia. .co websites can be legitimate domains, but always verify the website of a business before clicking on links.

Fake U.S government websites should be easy to spot because the fake sites do not end in .gov. The .gov domain is used only for government agencies. These websites are trustworthy.

Another way to tell the website may be fake is the design and content of the website. The design may seem very basic in comparison to the real website, and may not offer the same features as the legitimate one.