Is seattletimes.com legit or a scam?
The Seattle Times is a legitimate, Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization with a 30-year-old domain and an A+ rating from independent business bureaus.
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 similarities noted — cleared by the overall checks
Our vision model noted some visual similarity to a known brand, but the domain, security records, and reputation checks confirm this is the legitimate site — so this is shown for transparency, not as a red flag.
What our vision model saw
1 signalScreenshot incomplete — site may be slow to render
MT Intelligence
The domain has been registered for over 30 years, which is a primary indicator of an established and stable organization. Our antivirus network and malware engines found zero threats across 92 different scanners. The site is owned by a well-documented family business with a physical headquarters in Seattle and a long-standing A+ accreditation from independent business reviewers. While there are reports of fraudulent mail-in renewal notices, these are external scams targeting the newspaper's customers rather than a risk originating from the website itself. The technical infrastructure is secure and consistent with a major media outlet.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for seattletimes.com, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Domain seattletimes.com is the official website of The Seattle Times, a daily newspaper founded in 1886 based in Seattle, Washington.
- Owned and published by The Seattle Times Company, controlled by the Blethen family; regained full ownership in 2024 after buying out minority stake.
- Has received 11 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, including investigative reporting.
- BBB accredited business since September 1983 with A+ rating; physical office at 221 Yale Ave N, Seattle, WA.
- In 2014, the newspaper issued public warnings about fraudulent subscription renewal notices using fake company names mailed to subscribers.
- Some Reddit users report complaints about subscription pricing practices and customer service experiences.
- Domain age listed as 11083 days (~30 years); consistent with established news outlet.
- The Seattle Timesopen
"This notice is to alert you of a nationwide scam in which newspaper consumers, among other subscribers, in our market and other markets across the country have received fraudulent renewal notices."
- The Seattle Timesopen
"The fraudulent renewal notices could have a variety of company names such as Readers Payment Service, Associated Publishers Network, publisherpayment.com, unitedpubex.com, Orbital Publishing Group, Publishers Billing Exchange, United Publis"
- FOX 13 Seattleopen
"The newspaper said about a dozen people have been mailed the fake renewal invoices claiming to be from The Seattle Times. The phony documents..."
- Media Bias Fact Checkopen
"We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record."
- Wikipediaopen
"The Seattle Times has received 11 Pulitzer Prizes, the last being in 2015, and is widely renowned for its investigative journalism."
- BBBopen
"Seattle Times Company is BBB Accredited. BBB Accredited since 9/1/1983. ... BBB Rating A+"
The Seattle Times Company, family-owned by Blethen family for five generations; physical address 221 Yale Ave N Suite 500, Seattle, WA 98109; mailing P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111. BBB accredited since 1983, 130 years in business noted.
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Technical checksdomain · encryption · redirects · server reputation
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
- 1301http://seattletimes.com/
- 2202https://seattletimes.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 seattletimes.com and not a lookalike like s-eattletimes.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 seattletimes.com. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- seattletimes.com passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 96/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. seattletimes.com presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Amazon · Amazon RSA 2048 M04, expiring in 192 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- seattletimes.com is 30.4 years old, registered on 3/1/1996 through Amazon Registrar, 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 seattletimes.com as clean.
- No. seattletimes.com is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- seattletimes.com resolves to an IP operated by Amazon.com, 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. seattletimes.com 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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