Lookalike Character Checker
Scammers don't have to hack anything to fool you. They just need a link that looks right.
Computers use a system called Unicode to store every letter in every language, and thousands of those characters look identical, or nearly identical, to the ones on your keyboard. A Russian а and an English a look exactly the same on screen, but to a computer they're completely different letters. That means pаypal.com and paypal.com can be two separate websites, and only one of them belongs to PayPal.
This checker shows you every character in a link, email address, or username that isn't what it appears to be.
How scammers use these tricks
They swap in letters from Russian, Greek, or other alphabets that look like English. The fake address is a real website anyone can register, and the browser takes you there without any warning.
аpple.comNo foreign letters needed: a capital I in place of a lowercase l, the number 1 for an l, or an r and an n squeezed together to pass for an m.
paypaI.comgoog1e.comrnicrosoft.comSome characters take up no space at all. Hidden inside a word, they let someone create a username that looks exactly like yours, or sneak a message past a spam filter.
microsoftOne special character flips the direction of everything after it. A file that is really a program can show up looking like a photo or a PDF.
photogpj.exeYou'll run into these in phishing emails and texts, fake login pages, impersonator accounts on social media, and copycat online stores.
Check a link or name
Try , , , , , , or .
Loading the lookalike listβ¦
Curious how fake letters get made? The Fancy Text Generator turns normal text into ππ¨π₯π, ππΈππΎπ π, and other lookalike styles. Paste one back here to see every letter flagged. Try it →Don't click the link in the message. Type the address you already know into your browser yourself, or use a bookmark. That one habit beats almost every lookalike trick.
Look at the "Real address" line. That's where your browser would actually take you. If it starts with xn--, the address contains letters that aren't English, even if it looks perfectly normal.
Use the compare box when you know what a name is supposed to be. It tells you whether the two would look the same on screen even though the characters underneath are different.
Not every flag means a scam. Accented letters in names and words from other languages are completely normal. The warning sign is a lookalike letter inside a name that's pretending to be an English brand or a person you know.
Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you paste here is sent to us.
