Is fraunhofer.de legit or a scam?
Official website of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a world-leading German research organization with a long-standing reputation for scientific excellence.
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 belongs to a globally recognized research institution founded in 1949. Our analysis shows the site is hosted on a secure, clean infrastructure with a valid SSL certificate and zero flags from over 90 antivirus engines. The organization is a registered nonprofit in Germany and is a core part of the national research landscape. Web research confirms its legitimacy through numerous official government and academic citations. There are no scam reports or malicious indicators associated with this domain.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for fraunhofer.de, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Official website of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., a major German applied research organization founded in 1949.
- Headquartered in Munich (Hansastraße 27c, 80686 München); operates ~75 institutes with ~32,000 employees and €3.6 billion annual budget (2024 figures).
- Registered as a nonprofit (e.V.) with number VR 4461 at Amtsgericht München; recognized by German federal and state governments as a core part of the non-university research landscape.
- No scam reports, fraud complaints, or negative mentions found across web searches, Reddit, or review platforms specifically targeting fraunhofer.de.
- Subdomains like ipk.fraunhofer.de or imte.fraunhofer.de have varying ScamAdviser scores, but the main domain is the legitimate source cited by Wikipedia, government sites, and its own extensive research publications.
- The organization itself researches and combats fraud, phishing, deepfakes, and billing fraud; its site is frequently referenced in academic, industry, and official contexts.
- Trustpilot page for www.fraunhofer.de exists with limited reviews (score around 3.1/5 from 2 reviews as of early 2026).
- Wikipediaopen
"The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft ... is a German research organization with 75 institutes and research units ... With some 32,000 employees ... and an annual research budget of approximately € 3.6 billion, it is one of the world's leading organi"
- Research in Germanyopen
"Based in Germany, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the world’s leading applied research organisation and has a prominent position in the German research landscape."
Registered nonprofit association (e.V.) Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., registration no. VR 4461 at Amtsgericht München. Founded 1949, recognized as major non-university research organization.
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 (+49 89 1205).
- Links to 5 social profiles.
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1308http://fraunhofer.de/
- 2200https://www.fraunhofer.de/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 fraunhofer.de and not a lookalike like f-raunhofer.de.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 fraunhofer.de. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- fraunhofer.de passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 97/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. fraunhofer.de presents a valid TLSv1.2 certificate issued by Hellenic Academic and Research Institutions CA · GEANT TLS RSA 1, expiring in 112 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report fraunhofer.de as clean.
- No. fraunhofer.de is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- fraunhofer.de resolves to an IP operated by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Deutschland in DE (usage type: University/College/School). 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.
- Yes. fraunhofer.de sits in the global top-100k on Cloudflare Radar, which means it has substantial real-world traffic. That does not automatically make it safe, but established brands almost always rank here and throwaway scam domains almost never do.
- This is a permanent record of the scan run on June 30, 2026. The verdict and evidence above reflect that scan and do not change on their own. If circumstances around fraunhofer.de have changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan, which re-runs every check from scratch and publishes an updated report.
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