| Important Disclaimer |
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This page makes references to amazon.com and whois.com to bridge between what you know and what you need to know. |
The headings and some of the text have mouse-over effects to liven up the page.
Those effects are independent of your browser's copy-paste functionality.
If you intended to send an excerpt from this page to your wife but mistakenly sent her a prior text intended for your mistress, that is on you not me.
I have not decided whether this page will contain advertising.
The core content of this page takes up even most desktop screens, but one or more advertisements created by skilled graphic artists might enhance the existing text only layout.
Even without advertising it is difficult to present this much information even on a laptop or desktop screen.
On a cellphone screen it is that much more challenging.
To mitigate that, there are some navigation buttons below with which you can jump to sections within this page.
Scams on the internet are EXTREMELY common.
If I had a 100% accurate algorithm for identifying scam websites, I would patent it and become a billionaire.
Not a mere millionaire, but an outright billionaire many times over.
In saying I would be a billionaire many times over, I do not mean that in the way that politicians use hyperbolic language.
I literally mean I would be a billionaire many times over.
Sadly, I have no such absolutely perfectly accurate algorithm and neither does anyone else.
If you have watched enough cable news, you may have seen advertisements for The Willow Curve.
The Willow Curve was an object that looked like something that might have been auctioned off at a wrap party for Space 1999 or one of the Star Trek series.
Sales of the Willow Curve have been terminated, but the internet is full of sites making equally outrageous claims.
For many of us, the fact that a website makes outrageous claims may be enough to indicate that it is a scam.
Unfortunately, the mere presence of unrealistic claims may not be enough to satisfy someone that you care about when you are trying to convince a:
that some website is quite likely a scam.
Combined with other information, how recently a website address was created can be used to help evaluate whether a website is legitimate.
Between the time I started this page and the time I posted it to the internet, however many scammers created new scam websites.
Often, scammers create website addresses intended to trick people into believing the websites are those of legitimate businesses.
Sometimes addresses for the websites that scammers create look like nonsense.
In the section to follow we will lookup website address registration information for a well-known business.
When looking up website address registrations on your own, I strongly caution you to be wary of undesired autocorrect.
When doing a website address lookup, make absolutely certain that you lookup the address correctly.
A false sense of security can serve you much worse than no sense of security.
In the following example, we are going to lookup when the amazon.com website address was registered.
The intent of this lesson is not to specifically determine whether amazon.com is or is not a valid site.
The goal of this page is for you to be able to generalize from what you saw when doing a whois lookup for amazon.com.
Enter the following internet address in a browser window: https://www.whois.com/whois/
If it is easier to type than copy/paste on a given device, you can enter: whois.com/whois in a web browser's address box.
The screenshot above uses a date format one might use in the United States.
In the screenshot, we can see that the amazon.com website address was registered on November 1st 1994.
The website address is currently registered with MarkMonitor Inc.
MarkMonitor Inc. is a website address registrar often used by high value website addresses.
Currently the amazon.com website address is scheduled to expire on October 30, 2024.
Sometime between now and then, someone acting on behalf of amazon.com will extend the registration.
The combination of a website address registered almost 30 years ago with a high-end website address registrar such MarkMonitor Inc. would not suggest that amazon.com is a scam site.