No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Is lycos.com legit or a scam?
Real 31-year-old Lycos portal showing email migration notice with zero malware detections and no impersonation signals.
Analysis Summary
MT Intelligence
The domain is the genuine Lycos brand founded in 1995 and still owned by Lycos Inc. Technical scans returned zero malicious flags from our antivirus network and clean IP reputation. The page content matches the official announcement about discontinuing Lycos Mail and redirecting users to Exact Hosting. While independent review sites show complaints about outages and support, these relate to service quality rather than fraud or data theft. No clone indicators, no login forms harvesting credentials, and no scam-family matches were detected.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
Visual Screenshot Analysis
We capture a fresh screenshot of the live page and ask a vision model to look for scam visual patterns — fake trust badges, countdown timers, overlay pop-ups, and visual clones of legitimate brands.
No scam visual patterns detected
The screenshot shows the fully rendered legitimate Lycos homepage with standard branding, search bar, and a partnership notice; no scam indicators present.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for lycos.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Lycos.com launched April 1995 (31+ years old); Wikipedia confirms active search engine/web portal owned by Brightcom Group subsidiary Lycos, Inc.
- Email services (@lycos.com) being discontinued; partnership with Exact Hosting for migration announced on site.
- Trustpilot: 1.7/5 rating from 49 reviews citing downtime, poor support, and billing issues.
- BBB: D- rating; failure to respond to 14 complaints; multiple user reports of unaddressed support tickets and outages.
- Reddit threads report Lycos Mail downtime, spam originating from @lycos.com addresses, and abrupt shutdown of services like Angelfire without notice.
- No typosquat or clone indicators; domain is the authentic historic brand (not mimicking PayPal, etc.).
- IPQualityScore rates lycos.com low risk; used for legitimate personal email accounts.
Lycos, Inc., subsidiary of Brightcom Group, founded 1994/1995, HQ Waltham, MA
Our research found two older scam-related mentions: a 2000s Network World article about Lycos and phishers, plus a Reddit thread noting spam from @lycos.com addresses. Review sites show 20 complaints focused on downtime, poor support, and billing problems rather than outright fraud. Business records confirm Lycos Inc. as an active U.S. company founded in 1994.
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
- 1308http://lycos.com/
- 2200https://lycos.com/
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 lycos.com and not a lookalike like l-ycos.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 lycos.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- lycos.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 78/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. lycos.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · E8, expiring in 53 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- lycos.com is 31.2 years old, registered on 4/13/1995 through GoDaddy.com, LLC. 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 lycos.com as clean.
- No. lycos.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- lycos.com resolves to an IP operated by Vultr Holdings, LLC in US (usage type: Data Center/Web Hosting/Transit). 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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