Get Rich Fast was asked today by a reader to help identify a fake website purporting to be a government of Canada website, and that question was the inspiration for this post. Here is how to identify and protect yourself from a fake Canadian government website as sent by email scammers.

Often the scam will involve some attempt at cloaking the actual destination of any outbound links from the body of the email. Usually these are easily spotted by mousing your cursor over the link and reading the destination address in the footer bar of your browser or email client. Though some more clever scammers will try to avoid this by other means or by relying on those unaware of how to increase the security of their email clients and browsers. Whenever possible set your email client or browser to display in plain text and/or the full source code. That way you can view exactly where the outbound addresses lead.

Some more inventive scammers will go a bit further and will register domain names that are confusingly similar to the real thing. But with a bit of education and time you will quickly learn how to spot these as well. And the dead giveaway is always the domain name extension.

A domain name extension is always the last part after the “.” in a website address before the first trailing slash. For example this website uses the extension “ca” which is reserved for Canada. Scammers will try to cloak this by maybe even including the actual website address in their own url address by using subdomains:

Some further examples:
www.canada.gc.ca.imascammer.net/fake
In this example the domain extension is .net. Notice its location furthermost to the right and immediately before the first trailing slash.

www.canadarevenueagency..co.cc/
For this example the domain extension is .co.cc

We are all familiar with the most popular domain extensions like “com”, “net” and “org”. But when it comes to fake Government of Canada websites the one you need to remember is “gc.ca”. That domain name extension is reserved solely for the use by the Canadian government. If the email you get doesn’t have that as the domain name extension and is claiming to be from the Canadian government – it is a fake.

You can even go further to protect yourself if you are still unsure. You can visit the .gc.ca registry and confirm the domain exists in the official registry. Find the registry here – http://registre-registry.gc.ca/accueil-home_eng

One thing to never do though is even out of curiosity – is to click the links found in these emails or visit those websites. They are likely candidates for other nefarious activity like virus and trojan transmission to your website browser and computer.