isthisdodgy.co.uk

About

Is This Dodgy? is a free UK tool that checks links, emails, phone numbers and text messages for common scam patterns. We aim for one calm, plain-English answer. Not a 40-signal dashboard.

How it works

When you paste something we work out what it is and run it through:

  • UK consumer-scam patterns (Royal Mail "fee", "Hi Mum", HMRC refund, bank impersonation, energy rebate, romance, crypto and more).
  • URL heuristics. Punycode, IP-as-host, suspicious top-level domains, brand impersonation, link shorteners.
  • Domain age via the public RDAP service. Brand-new domains are very common in scams.
  • Live DNS lookups to see if the address actually resolves.
  • Google Safe Browsing and abuse.ch URLhaus when an API key is configured.
  • The OpenPhish community feed of known phishing URLs (refreshed every 12 hours).
  • IPQualityScore fraud scores for links, emails and phone numbers when a key is configured.
  • Phone-number checks via the open-source libphonenumber library: premium-rate prefixes, line type, country.
  • Email reputation via EmailRep and StopForumSpam.
  • A bundled list of throwaway and disposable email providers.

What this is not

It's not antivirus software. It can't tell you whether a link will install malware or whether a caller is who they say they are. It's a fast first-look tool. Anything important (a payment, a login, a transfer) should be verified directly with the company, using contact details from their official website.

About phone-number reports

Crowd-sourced "people have reported this number as a scam" data is not freely available. Tellows, Truecaller and Hiya all gate that data behind enterprise contracts. The closest freely-available approximation is IPQualityScore's abuse-network score, which is what we use when an IPQS key is configured. If you want full crowd-sourced reports for a specific number, sites like whocallsme.com and tellows.co.uk are worth a look.

Hedging on purpose

We use words like "likely", "looks like" and "we can't confirm" deliberately. A tool that claims certainty it doesn't have causes more harm than help.

Where to report