Jake Ludington

As doing business online continues to get easier, opportunists looking to make a few bones at the expense of the naive will continue to become more prevalent. Some of these hucksters try to dupe personal information out of unsuspecting customers of legitimate businesses through dummied-up marketing materials and back alley Web sites created specifically to collect valid credit card information. Other fraudulent activities are more carefully disguised as locations for legitimate commerce, collecting payment without every delivering the goods and services promised. The Better Business Bureau and other services like them attempt to validate legitimate centers of commerce, but figuring out who the good guys are isn’t always clear cut. I sometimes find it hard to know whether a site is legitimate or attempting to mislead me at times. FraudEliminator steps in to fill this void providing immediate feedback about sites you visit and the possibility of fraudulence. The company maintains a database of known fraudulent sites and warns you of potential fraud when visiting any of the sites maintained in the database, similar to the way live protection from viruses and spyware works in other applications. The interface for FraudEliminator is a toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer (it offers to install Firefox on install). Settings are configurable to provide differing degrees of protection, offering warnings for sites hosted in popular fraud zones or opting for more paranoid settings to warn against virtually everything. If a false positive warning is presented for a site you know to be safe, mark the site as safe and never see the warning for that site again. In addition to providing fraud information, it also provides quick access to WhoIs data for sites you visit, so you can easily see who owns the sites you visit. A fraud reporting button is built in, so if you discover a new scam, you can let FraudEliminator know, which when validated updates their database keeping other users protected as well. All fraud submissions are validated by the company and they do not take the guilty until proven innocent tactics of some services in the junk mail prevention industry. The free version does occasionally nag for an upgrade and does not receive database updates as frequently as the pro version but may be used indefinitely. If you or anyone you know is concerned about the legitimacy of claims they receive through email or online purchase they may be considering, FraudEliminator makes a smart choice for keeping your protected. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00/19.99]