Verdict
10xenergy.co.za shows high-risk / scam indicators.
This assessment found strong scam indicators. Do not pay, sign in, or share personal details with this site.
| What this site appears to be | Local South African solar company (10X Energy) offering design, installation, storage, maintenance and consulting services. Includes contact details, address, phone, email, project examples, and a newsletter subscribe form. No investment or crypto activity detected. |
|---|
Evidence status and limitations
Evidence completeness: UNKNOWN
- The real-world operator identity was not independently verified.
- Module-level completeness metadata is unavailable for this legacy report.
At a glance
The checks that decide most of this verdict.
| Malware engines | 10 flagged itVirusTotal | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Google Safe Browsing | Not listedGoogle | Clear |
| Abuse reports on the host | 0 reportsAbuseIPDB; shared hosting inflates this count | Noted |
| Domain age | 2.4 years oldRegistered history | Clear |
| Web archive | Archived since 20244 snapshots | Clear |
| Certificate | Encrypted connectionIssued by YR2 | Noted |
The page as captured
Key findings
- Automated classification: Sensitive Interaction Risk.
- Domain age: 1 to 3 years (registration continuity).
- Public web-archive history exists since 2024.
- At least one reputation service TrustSniffer consulted had flagged this domain at assessment time.
Full analysis
Security Alert
Fortinet flagged this site in external intelligence checks, indicating elevated compromise/scam exposure that requires immediate caution.
10X Energy is presented as a South African solar-services business offering residential, commercial, and industrial solar design and installation, energy storage, backup systems, maintenance, repairs, energy audits, and related consultations. The site’s apparent business model is based on product sales, installation contracts, maintenance agreements, and on-site customer enquiries.
Scam/Impersonation Risk
The site carries a highly cautionary sensitive-interaction risk because external threat intelligence records a confirmed blacklist hit, including multiple malicious detections and a Fortinet threat detection. This external signal conflicts with the otherwise ordinary presentation of a local solar contractor and is sufficiently material that the site should not be treated as safe for credentials, account access, or financial transactions. No identity contradiction, brand impersonation, or phishing indicator was identified in the supplied page analysis, and the homepage itself contains no detected investment, cryptocurrency, or credential-harvesting functionality; those benign content findings do not offset the confirmed external detections.
- External scanning recorded 10 malicious detections and a Fortinet tier-one threat flag; blacklist status was confirmed by two external sources.
- The homepage describes solar installation and energy services, with no detected login form, hidden sensitive form, wallet connection, or investment activity.
- The site’s behavioral capture recorded 6 external XHR requests and 7 external POST requests, all classified as non-whitelisted, with suspicious network activity identified during testing.
Regulatory Verification Notes
The site identifies itself as 10X Energy and presents an apparently conventional commercial service offering, including claims of being fully insured, using no subcontractors, and providing a two-to-five-year workmanship guarantee. Those claims establish the site’s stated proposition but do not independently verify the operating entity. The operator identity remains unverified, and the supplied business information does not include a claimed license authority or license number; this is a regulatory and disclosure item requiring confirmation rather than, by itself, proof of fraud. The separate broker-reputation dataset produced no match, which provides no affirmative regulatory endorsement.
- Domain registration: 2024-04-10; approximately 2.35 years old; registrar 1-Grid; registered organization listed as Dsl Telecom.
- Web archive: 4 snapshots spanning 2024–2024, with 1 year tracked.
- Server telemetry identified AS2639 (ZOHO-AS - ZOHO, US); infrastructure resolution separately identified AS36943 (1 GRID (PTY) LTD, ZA).
- TLS certificate: issuer YR2, DV validation, valid to 2026-11-07.
What to Verify Next
Before any contract, payment, or exchange of sensitive information, independently confirm that the named operating entity, physical address, insurance statement, and workmanship guarantee correspond to a real South African business. Licensing or trade-registration requirements applicable to the proposed installation work should be checked with the relevant South African authority or registry, using independently obtained contact details rather than relying solely on the website. Any quotation, deposit request, or service agreement should also be validated through an offline or independently sourced contact route, and endpoint security controls should block or isolate access until the external reputation issue is resolved.
- The homepage provides the business name, service descriptions, insurance statement, subcontractor statement, and workmanship-guarantee claim for independent confirmation.
- The contact and consultation workflow is presented as the principal customer-engagement route.
- The site contains one newsletter-signup form and no sensitive form was detected in the supplied page analysis.
Summary Verdict
The overall posture is critical trust risk, with the confirmed external threat and blacklist signals outweighing the site’s professional commercial presentation. The website may represent a genuine solar-services proposition, but the available evidence does not support treating it as trustworthy for sensitive interaction or financial commitment.
Infrastructure Integrity
The site resolves to one likely origin address without a detected CDN or WAF layer, so the hosting arrangement provides limited protective mitigation against reputation or infrastructure concerns. The observed infrastructure is associated with 1 GRID in South Africa, while server telemetry identifies ZOHO in the United States; this reflects the supplied hosting observations but does not establish operator identity.
Closing Assessment
Prospective engagement should remain suspended for sensitive actions until the business identity, service claims, payment destination, and external threat findings have been independently validated and the site’s reputation has been reassessed.
Written analysis generated 2026-08-18 by the TrustSniffer Analysis Engine from the evidence in this report.
What the analysis found
1 finding contributed to this verdict, raised by analysis engine, behaviour in a sandbox, external reputation.
01 Sensitive Interaction Risk
- The analysis matched a pattern TrustSniffer treats as a direct threat to a visitor.Analysis engine
signal:direct_threat - The page sent data to a destination TrustSniffer does not recognise.Behaviour in a sandbox
rule:BEHAV_NONWHITELISTED_POSTS - The page made background requests to destinations TrustSniffer does not recognise.Behaviour in a sandbox
rule:BEHAV_NONWHITELISTED_XHR - A large share of what the page loaded came from other domains.Behaviour in a sandbox
rule:BEHAV_EXTERNAL_RATIO_MODERATE - The page exchanged network traffic with destinations TrustSniffer does not recognise.Behaviour in a sandbox
rule:BEHAV_NONWHITELISTED_TRAFFIC - An external threat feed lists this domain: either Google Safe Browsing marked it malicious, or a significant number of malware engines flagged it.External reputation
rule:EXT_BLACKLIST_CRITICAL
Identity verification
| Status | UNVERIFIED |
|---|---|
| Identity score | 30/100 |
| Identity verification confidence | 50% |
- No on-site identity signals detected
Identity verification measures whether the site can be independently connected to a real-world brand or person. It is separate from the classification confidence.
What TrustSniffer observed
First-party facts recorded during the assessment of 10xenergy.co.za.
- The request stayed on 10xenergy.co.za. It was not redirected to another domain. Clear
- Registration is published under 1-Grid. Clear
- DNS for this domain is served by 1-grid.com, across 4 name servers. Noted
- The registration is paid up to 2027-04-10. Noted
- The earliest public archive of this site is from 2024-06-10. Clear
- It is hosted on ZOHO-AS, from a server in US. Noted
Domain intelligence
| Registrar | 1-Grid |
|---|---|
| Hosting | ZOHO-AS - ZOHO, US |
| Country | US |
| Server IP | 136.143.185.12 |
| Name servers | linus.ns.1-grid.com, linus.ns.1-grid.net, linus.ns.1-grid.co.za, linus.ns.1-grid.co.uk |
| SSL issuer | YR2 |
| SSL expiry | 2026-11-07 |
| Domain age | 2.35 years (continuous registration) |
| Domain expiry | 2027-04-10 |
| Archive first seen | 2024-06-10 |
| Archive snapshots | 4 |
| Reputation | VirusTotal: 10 flagged | AbuseIPDB: 0 reports | Google Safe Browsing: 0 matches |
About this assessment
A trust score summarises the evidence TrustSniffer could collect about 10xenergy.co.za at assessment time. It is a starting point for your own judgement, not a guarantee: a high score means the signals were consistent with a legitimately operated site, a low or critical score means several risk patterns were present.
TrustSniffer assesses a website from the evidence it can collect at a point in time: domain registration and age, hosting and certificate, the content the site served, and third-party reputation feeds. A score is a summary of that evidence, not a guarantee and not a legal finding. There is no human rating and no user review in it. A site can change after it is assessed.