It can be easy to get confused when someone sends you a phishing mail check, text or social media post. A suspicious link might look familiar, or it could be a link to an illegitimate website that can steal your information or infect your device with malware. To help you avoid being a victim of cyber crime, there are many ways to check the safety of a link. A phish link checker is a free tool that you can use to determine whether the website in a given URL is safe.

Malicious links often contain shortened URLs. Cyber criminals also employ other tricks to hide the URL destination, including using URL encoding (e.g. the letter B can translate to %42). In addition, phishers use misspellings and special characters to make their malicious sites more difficult to identify.

Best Ways to Prevent Fraud with Email Address Assessment

In addition, phishers can use their websites to collect users’ personal information such as credit card details, passwords or login credentials under the pretense of verifying an identity or updating a security system. They can also serve software updates or fake invoices that can infect devices with malware.

A phishing link can be hard to spot, especially when it’s embedded in an email message with a familiar-looking layout and address you by your name. That’s why it’s important to teach employees about the different types of phishing scams and other online threats. Additionally, implementing DMARC helps protect your organization from phishing and other attack types.