Is qsl.net legit or a scam?
Established amateur radio community hosting service (since 1996) with thousands of users, clean reputation, and no fraud indicators.
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. See full visual analysis →
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.
Visual red flags detected in the screenshot
The screenshot depicts a fully-rendered, long-established amateur radio community homepage with no scam-pattern indicators; the only payment element is a standard PayPal donate button consistent with a volunteer-funded service.
What our vision model saw
6 signalsPage is fully rendered and displays a coherent amateur radio community website (QSL.NET) with navigation, body text, and images intact.
PayPal donate buttons appear twice on the page, consistent with a legitimate donation-funded community site rather than a payment-harvesting pattern.
Design is dated/utilitarian (table-based layout, early-2000s aesthetic) but internally consistent with a long-running hobbyist community site.
No countdown timers, urgency banners, fake trust badges, or intrusive modals visible.
No pre-filled forms requesting sensitive credentials, wallet seeds, or financial data visible.
No mismatched domain or clone indicators present; branding and content are consistent throughout.
MT Intelligence
QSL.net is a well-documented, long-running volunteer-operated service dedicated exclusively to the amateur radio community. The domain was registered in January 1997 and has operated continuously for nearly 30 years under transparent leadership — founded by Al Waller K3TKJ and operated by Scott Neader KA9FOX since 2009, with a published mailing address in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Our scan found no malware, no phishing blocklist hits, and zero abuse reports on the hosting IP. The single detection from one engine (CRDF) is an outlier against 91 clean engines and does not align with the site's legitimate purpose or infrastructure. The page itself displays a coherent, dated but functional community homepage with PayPal donation buttons consistent with a volunteer-funded service, not a payment-harvesting scheme. Web research confirms thousands of active users, positive community mentions, and no scam or fraud complaints targeting the platform itself.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for qsl.net, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Domain registered January 28, 1997 (over 29 years old), expires January 2027, registrar Cloudflare.
- Dedicated free web hosting and email forwarding (callsign@qsl.net) exclusively for licensed amateur radio operators since 1996.
- Founded by Al Waller K3TKJ; operated by Scott Neader KA9FOX (KA9FOX) since 2009. Physical mailing address in La Crosse, WI for donations.
- Hosts thousands of ham radio personal sites, DX logs, technical articles, and subdomains like dx.qsl.net.
- Past incidents of individual user subpages flagged by StopBadware/Google (remediated by admins); some sandbox analyses of specific hosted files but no site-wide scam reports.
- No scam, fraud, or phishing reports found for qsl.net itself. Separate complaints target unrelated "QSL World" email service.
- Described positively as a "real platform for amateur radio operators, with thousand users" on Reddit.
- admin.qsl.netopen
"QSL.net is dedicated to the sole purpose of furthering the abilities and interest of the Amateur Radio Community. If you are a licensed Amateur Radio Operator you are invited to reserve your free space on this server."
- admin.qsl.net/aboutopen
"QSL.net was started in 1996 by Al Waller K3TKJ and run continuously until Al retired at the end of 2008. In early January 2009, Scott Neader KA9FOX and ..."
- Reddit r/threebodyproblemopen
"We can see that qsl.net is a real platform for amateur radio operators , with thousand users."
Operated by Scott Neader KA9FOX since 2009 (mailing address: N1774 Meadow Ridge Rd, La Crosse, WI 54601). Registered 1997, expires 2027. Funded by donations; provides free hosting for licensed hams. Not a formal corporation in searches.
We searched scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, and general web sources for qsl.net and found zero scam reports and zero complaints. Instead, we found three positive references confirming QSL.net as a legitimate, long-established amateur radio community platform with thousands of active users. The site's founder, Al Waller K3TKJ, is documented as a licensed ham operator since 1962 with a legacy in the amateur radio community. The current operator, Scott Neader KA9FOX, maintains a published mailing address in La Crosse, Wisconsin. No fraud, phishing, or abuse complaints target the platform itself.
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 (2009-2026).
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://qsl.net/
- 2301https://qsl.net/
- 3200https://admin.qsl.net/index.phpcross-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 qsl.net and not a lookalike like q-sl.net.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 qsl.net. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- qsl.net passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 86/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. qsl.net presents a valid TLSv1.2 certificate issued by Google Trust Services · WE1, expiring in 87 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- qsl.net is 29.4 years old, registered on 1/28/1997 through Cloudflare, Inc.. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- 1 out of 92 antivirus engines in our malware network flagged qsl.net as malicious or suspicious (1 outright malicious). Even one detection is a meaningful signal.
- No. qsl.net is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- qsl.net 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.
- Yes. qsl.net 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.
User reviews & comments(0)
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