Before you buy anything online, run these checks first.
You've found the car. The price looks right. The seller seems fine. You click through to pay — and the website asks for your card details.
Here's the question you should be asking before you type a single digit: is this website actually real?
It doesn't take long to find out. It takes about two minutes. And those two minutes can save you a lot more than embarrassment.
Some are well-designed, professional, and completely fake. What you're checking for is whether the site has a verifiable history, a real identity behind it, and no track record of taking people's money and disappearing.
That covers three things: the web address, the security, and the reputation.
Look at the URL in your browser bar before you do anything else. Is it exactly what you expected? Scammers buy domains that look almost right — one letter off, a hyphen added, a .co instead of .co.uk. If you searched for a company and clicked a link, go back and check the address directly. Type it in yourself.
A padlock icon in the address bar means the connection is encrypted. That's basic, and it's good. But it doesn't mean the site is honest. Plenty of scam sites have HTTPS. The padlock tells you nobody is intercepting the data — it doesn't tell you who you're sending it to.
Fraudulent websites are usually new. They get set up, take money, and get shut down before anyone catches up with them.
You can check when a domain was registered at whois.domaintools.com. Type in the web address and it will tell you how old the domain is, who registered it, and where. A legitimate business that's been trading for years will have a domain to match. A site registered three weeks ago that claims to be an established company should make you stop.
Several free tools will tell you whether a website has any history of scam reports, malware, or fraud flags.
None of these is definitive on its own. A clean result doesn't guarantee the site is legitimate — it might just be new. That's why domain age matters. Use them together.
Legitimate businesses have contact details. A phone number. A physical address. An email that isn't a Gmail. If the only way to reach them is a form on a page, that's a flag.
Check for a Companies House number if it's a UK business. Any company that has been incorporated will have one. You can verify it at find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk. If they claim to be a registered company and there's no number on the site, ask yourself why not.
Look at the social media links. Do they go anywhere real? An Instagram page with 40 followers and no posts isn't reassurance — it's a warning.
Before you give anyone money, search the company name plus the word "scam" or "review." Takes fifteen seconds. If other people have had a bad experience, they've usually written about it somewhere.
Check Trustpilot. Check Google reviews. Check whether any reviews seem real — a cluster of five-star reviews posted in the same week, all with similar wording, is often manufactured.
The website question gets more specific. You might be using a car check service to verify the vehicle. You might be buying through a platform you've never used before.
Before you pay for any check or hand over details to any site, run through the steps above. The check site should have a verifiable domain history. It should appear clean in reputation tools. It should have real contact details and a registered company behind it.
We're registered at Companies House. Our number is on the site. You can look us up. That's not a boast — it's the minimum standard any legitimate service should meet.
Most people skip this. The site looked fine, the price was good, they were in a hurry.
It takes two minutes to check. Run the URL through URLVoid. Look at the domain age. Search the name. If everything comes back clean, carry on. If something feels off — it usually is.
Have you Legit checked it?
Everything above — the domain check, the reputation scan, the Companies House lookup, the review patterns — we do all of it automatically. You put in the registration number. We do the rest. One click, plain English, before you hand over a penny.
Before the viewing. Before the test drive. Before the bank transfer. Run the free check on the registration first.