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About MerkShield

Know if a link is safe — before you click.

What it is

MerkShield is a free phishing checker for ordinary people. Paste a link, a QR code, a suspicious text message, or a LinkedIn job offer, and it tells you in plain English whether it's safe — in under three seconds, with no account and no tracking.

How it works

Every scan runs seven independent detection engines in parallel:

• URL structure analysis — the tell-tale shapes of phishing links (digit-swapped brands like paypa1, deceptive subdomains, abused TLDs)
• Domain age — scam domains are usually days old
• Google Safe Browsing — Google's database of dangerous sites
• VirusTotal — 70+ antivirus vendors' verdicts
• PhishTank — community-confirmed phishing reports
• URLScan.io — loads the page safely and photographs it
• Machine learning — a model trained on real phishing data that catches brand-new scams no blocklist has seen yet

The verdicts are fused into one score and translated into plain English — what's wrong, why it matters, and what to do next.

Why it's free

Because the people most targeted by phishing — parents, grandparents, anyone busy enough to click first and think second — are the least likely to pay for protection. Awareness shouldn't have a price tag. No ads, no data selling, no premium tier holding the important checks hostage.

Who built it

MerkShield is built and run by one person, as an open-source project. If it saves one person's savings from a fake "your parcel is held" text, it's done its job.