Reαd carefully: how to spot – and avoid – a homoglyph attack

Many scams have near-identical URLs but a closer look reveals a cyrillic letter, which offers a world of difference between legit and scam. Photograph: Kirill Ivanov/Alamy

You’ve read the email carefully and it looks legitimate. The link it asks you to click on has none of the usual red flags: there are no weird numbers or extra parts to the URL. You feel safe to proceed.

But if you had looked slightly closer you may have noticed something slightly wrong with one of the characters. Just as in the headline of this piece where instead of “a” we used the Cyrillic “α”.