Fake vs. Real Websites:

From my experience, fake websites are fairly obvious to find. Though there seems to be two different types of fake sites: those that are trying to replicate another, more popular, site and those that are indeed original sites, but the only objective is to steal your information. The goal of these sites is the same though: to gather as much data as they can about the user. When I was about 10, Myspace was a big target for cyber criminals. Sites would popup resembling the exact myspace login page but the link was a letter or two off from the real site. They would send out an email telling you to change your password, you’d click the link to this fake site, enter in your login info as if to sign in, and boom, now they have your info. Other sites popular during the myspace days were sites you could go to that had html written out so you could customize your page. All you had to do was copy the code and insert it onto your myspace page. Because of this customization- fraudulent sites popped up, these sites weren’t as easy to decipher. However, a few things made it obvious: extreme popups that made it very difficult to navigate the page, requirements to download a browser extension, and excessive spelling errors. Its easy to make one or two spelling mistakes, however, fraudulent sites tend to have an overwhelming amount.