In our last email we told you about the Get Safe Online check-a-website tool that lets you type in a website, then goes off and does a number of checks on it and tells you whether it is likely to be a safe website.
But what about an email address? How do you tell if an email address is legitimate or not, and even if a website is safe, is it the official website you are looking for?
A Web address, or you might hear it referred to as a URL is made up of several parts.
The 1st and 3rd parts are not important and as far as identifying a legitimate site, you should ignore anything in these parts. They are simply there to take you to the correct part of the website and in many cases will be missing.
The 2nd element is the important bit. This is where the domain or brand and domain extension (also referred to as the top level domain or TLD) appear. This is where you will see nhs.uk, gov.uk or amazon.co.uk.
The domain (the gov part) must be a single word. It can be hyphenated but can not contain a period. Anything before a period is part of the 1st part.
So, https://www.gov.uk/renew-driving-licence uses gov.uk as the domain and /renew-driving-licence in the 5th part to take you to the correct part of the government website.
https://apply-provisional-driving-licence.service.gov.uk/ also uses gov.uk as the domain, but this time uses apply-provisional-driving-licence.service in the second part.
Both are valid and take you to a legitimate gov.uk website.
In the example https://www.gov.driving-licence.renew.co.uk/ the domain is renew.co.uk and is not an official gov.uk website.
The UK Government and NHS websites are huge, but they will nearly always use gov.uk or nhs.uk in the domain / domain extension and use the 2nd and 5th part of the website address to take you to the correct department or function.
A word of warning about searching for something like “renew my driving licence” or “commemorative King Charles Coins”. When a search engine returns its results the top few entries usually pay for their results to appear at the top and you will see “Ad” displayed beside the result. These will often take you to sites that charge for something that may be free on the official site or may charge a premium for a product.
For example, if you are looking for commemorative King Charles coins that have just been released by The Royal Mint, then you should only purchase them from the official Royal Mint website – https://www.royalmint.com/ Buying from any other source, at best you may pay a premium, at worst you maybe buying a fake product or even fresh air.
Some legitimate domains you will come across, but are often impersonated in scams.
nhs.uk (you will also get emails, appointments etc from nhs.net)
Official delivery domains often impersonated in delivery scams
parcelforce.som
Think you’ve got it? If you fancy testing what you have learnt in the last few slides, there’s a short online Quiz you can take.
https://phishingquiz.withgoogle.com/
If you would like some support as a result of becoming a victim of an online scam contact Victim Support by visiting victimsupport.org.uk
