Scam Check

In our world of today with its complexity, there are people trying everything to steal from you. Computers and the Internet are used to get you to reveal your information so they can get access to your bank accounts and many other things they can gain from you.

I am writing this article to give you an understanding of one aspect of the many ways people try to scam you, and get you to do something you do not intend to do.

When on your computer or laptop you "get on the Internet," you use a "browser" such as FireFox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Oracle, or others. You can go many places by clicking on things.

Most browsers have a feature that you should learn to use to be confident that it is taking you to the websites you intend to see. Every website, and web page has a "Web Address." The technical term for this is a URL which stands for "Uniform Resource Locator."

I want to give you some understanding about URLs and show you how to "check" if you are going where you think you are going. It can be a sure way to avoid some scams.

The web address for the Boeing Airplane Company is "boeing.com". That is the simplest form. You may also see "www.boeing.com". If you type either of these you will get to the same Home Page of the Boeing Company. The www stands for "World Wide Web", the Internet. Often when you type in either of these in the Address bar of your browser, and hit Enter, it will change automatically to "https://www.boeing.com".

Here, the "https:" stands for "HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure", and sometimes you may see just "http://somename.com" which is not a secure website. Every major website, bank, store, government agency, etc. should be "secure" with "https:" Only things like personal websites or some older sites will use "http:". Never trust them for business transactions or give them any sensitive information.

More terminology: "HyperText" refers to the kind of text that you can click on to activate it or jump to somewhere else. "Transfer Protocol" refers to the way the computer sends information to and gets information from the Internet. There are a few other "Transfer Protocols" like "ftp:" which is "File Transfer Protocol". Most people may never see any of these others, but your computer uses them behind the scenes.

Here is What to Check

In your browser window, in the lower left corner, you can check where you are about to go if you click on the thing your mouse pointer is on.

It looks like this:

This is an eMail viewed in Firefox.

Notice it says: https://info.key.com/pub/cc?_ri_=XO.... The important part is "https://info.key.com/". This is the crucial part to be sure is correct. First you need to be able to verify what part is the website address. Here it is "key.com". The very first part, the "https://" may not always be there, or it may be "http://" (not secure), or perhaps "ftp://" and in some cases this first part may be missing completely. So you may see just "info.key.com" and nothing more. In all these cases "key.com" is the website address for "Key Bank".

At any rate if there is anything following "key.com", the next character must be a "/". If it is anything else, beware!

Lets break down this "info.key.com". The .com is called the "Top Level Domain" and ".com" stands for commercial. That would be all banks, stores, commercial companies, etc. Other "Top Level Domain Names" are ".org" for Organizations, ".edu" for Educational Institutions, schools and universities. ".gov" for Governmental sites, including local, city, state and federal. ".net" for things related to the Internet or "Networking". And there are quite a few more. Many of the two letter Top Level Domain Names are for countries. A few of the common ones are .uk for the United Kingdom; .ca for Canada; .de for Germany; .cn for China; .eu for European Union.

Next, to the left of ".com" is the "Domain Name" of the specific company, person or organization, so "key.com" is owned by Key Bank, and no one else on the Internet can use that name.

Finally the "info." part is called a "Sub-Domain". It gets you to a specific major section of Key Bank's Website.

Everything up to the first "single slash" "/" can be lower-case, UPPER-CASE, Mixed_Case, or even crazy MiXEd-cASe. The case is ignored, and in fact as far as the internal communication is concerned, everything up to the "/" is converted to lower-case inside. After the "/", case is important and must be maintained as is.

So, as a result, when you see the URL in the lower corner of your browser window, everything before the "/" will always be lower case. If not, BEWARE! Here is a picture illustrating the fact that your browser does indeed convert it to lower case:

In this example I typed the name of my website the way I like people to remember it, and just below that the browser offers a match you can click on, in blue, converted to all lower case.

Here are a few more examples:

and:

I have noticed that when using my version of Google's Chrome browser, When you first move your mouse pointer over a link, Chrome immediately shows you exactly what the link in the page is:

And then a split second later you see it expanded by the browser to its full form: