Is archiveofourown.com legit or a scam?
Archive of Our Own is a highly reputable, non-profit fanfiction repository with nearly 20 years of history and over 11 million registered users.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
MT Intelligence
The domain has been registered for over 19 years and is owned by the Organization for Transformative Works, a verified U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit. Our antivirus network shows zero detections across 93 different security engines. While some users have reported phishing concerns, these reports actually refer to malicious 'clone' sites that try to imitate AO3, rather than this official domain itself. The site loads legitimate resources from trusted non-profit infrastructure and maintains a massive, active community. We found no evidence of malicious behavior or fraudulent intent on this domain.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for archiveofourown.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- archiveofourown.com is an officially registered and owned domain by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit behind AO3; it redirects to archiveofourown.org.
- OTW explicitly lists archiveofourown.com as safe/official in their phishing advisory and FAQ; users are advised to verify they are on archiveofourown.org before entering login credentials.
- OTW is a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 38-3765024, active since 2008) with public IRS filings and millions in reported net assets.
- The site at archiveofourown.com serves identical non-profit fanfiction archive content (17M+ works, 11M+ users) as the .org domain.
- No evidence of malware, phishing, or scam reports targeting archiveofourown.com itself; complaints refer to fake phishing clones (e.g. archiveofourowno.com) or scam comments on the real AO3.
- Community (Reddit r/AO3, Wikipedia) and third-party sources (Trustpilot) consistently describe AO3/OTW as legitimate and non-commercial.
- Domain age of ~19 years (registered ~2007) aligns with OTW's founding and AO3 launch in 2008.
- transformativeworks.orgopen
"While we also own the domain names archiveofourown.net and archiveofourown.com they redirect you to archiveofourown.org, and that is the only site where you should enter your AO3 login information."
- Reddit r/AO3open
"It's a phishing scam. Don't click, don't give it login info. The scammers have some SEO stuff going on to make it show for search engines."
- Wikipediaopen
"Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit, open-source repository for fanfiction (fanfic) and other fanworks contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works."
- Reddit r/AO3open
"Yes, they're both legit. Here's the list of official domains... https://archiveofourown.com"
- Trustpilotopen
"Archive of Our Own is a Hugo Award-winning nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users."
Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a registered U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 38-3765024, tax-exempt since Aug 2008) based in New York. AO3 is an official project of OTW.
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 phone number listed on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1302http://archiveofourown.com/
- 2200https://archiveofourown.org/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 archiveofourown.com and not a lookalike like a-rchiveofourown.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 directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on archiveofourown.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- archiveofourown.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 91/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. archiveofourown.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Google Trust Services · WE1, expiring in 69 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- archiveofourown.com is 19.1 years old, registered on 5/30/2007 through PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 93 antivirus engines in our malware network report archiveofourown.com as clean.
- No. archiveofourown.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- archiveofourown.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.
- This is a permanent record of the scan run on June 29, 2026. The verdict and evidence above reflect that scan and do not change on their own. If circumstances around archiveofourown.com have changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan, which re-runs every check from scratch and publishes an updated report.
User reviews & comments(0)
Share your experience — "Lost $200 on a fake checkout" is more useful than "Scam". Your review helps others avoid traps.