No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Is about.com legit or a scam?
Legitimate corporate homepage for People Inc., a major US publisher, running on a 27-year-old domain with zero malicious detections.
Analysis Summary
MT Intelligence
The page presents itself as the official corporate site for People Inc., listing physical office addresses, multiple contact emails, and leadership details. The domain is over 27 years old and registered through a major registrar with no privacy masking. Our antivirus network and browser blocklists returned completely clean results, and the hosting IP shows zero abuse reports. Evidence from business records confirms ownership by IAC, a publicly traded company, with a documented rebrand history. No scam families, clone indicators, or negative mentions appeared in our research.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for about.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Domain about.com registered ~27 years ago (9941 days as of query)
- Page title and description confirm ownership by People Inc., America’s largest digital and print publisher
- No scam reports, fraud mentions, or complaints found in web searches for 'about.com scam', 'review', 'complaint', or Reddit
- Owned by IAC (public company); previously About Inc., Dotdash, Dotdash Meredith
- Historical site (launched 1990s as MiningCo.com, rebranded 1999); nostalgic references on Reddit but no negative security flags
- Trustpilot page exists for www.about.com with descriptive snippet only; one unrelated review aggregator notes low rating from 14 old reviews
Owned by People Inc. (IAC subsidiary, NASDAQ: IAC); rebranded from Dotdash Meredith in 2025
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
- Phone number listed ((212) 204-4000).
- Links to 2 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://about.com/
- 2301https://www.dotdashmeredith.com/cross-domain
- 3200https://www.people.inc/cross-domain
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on about.com and not a lookalike like a-bout.com.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered from the scan data on this page. These are auto-generated — not hand-written — so they always match the underlying report.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on about.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- about.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 90/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. about.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · E8, expiring in 47 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- about.com is 27.2 years old, registered on 3/12/1999 through MarkMonitor Inc.. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report about.com as clean.
- No. about.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- about.com resolves to an IP operated by Cloudflare, Inc. in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- We cache results for 24 hours. Signed-in MalwareTips members can trigger a manual rescan at any time using the "Rescan" button on the report page, which re-runs every check from scratch and refreshes this page.
User reviews & comments(0)
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