Verdict
23designs.net 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 | Personal portfolio website for Dave Caselli, a 3D animator in Atlanta. Shows reel/portfolio items, a short bio, and clear contact details (email and phone) for hiring. |
|---|
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 | 24 years oldRegistered history | Clear |
| Web archive | Archived since 200273 snapshots | Clear |
| Certificate | Encrypted connectionIssued by YR2 | Noted |
The page as captured
Key findings
- Automated classification: Sensitive Interaction Risk.
- Domain age: more than 10 years (registration continuity).
- Public web-archive history exists since 2002.
- At least one reputation service TrustSniffer consulted had flagged this domain at assessment time.
Full analysis
Security Alert
Fortinet, Sophos flagged this site in external intelligence checks, indicating elevated compromise/scam exposure that requires immediate caution.
23 Designs is a personal portfolio website for Dave Caselli, an Atlanta-based 3D animator presenting reels and examples of 3D animation, motion graphics, and retouching work. Its apparent business model is project-based freelance creative services, with visitors invited to review the portfolio and make direct contact for hiring.
Scam/Impersonation Risk
A critical interaction risk is present despite the site’s benign portfolio presentation. External reputation evidence includes a confirmed blacklist status, with malicious detections from major security vendors; this is a substantive contradiction that outweighs the absence of visible login forms, credential-harvesting mechanisms, financial offers, or brand-impersonation content on the reviewed pages. The homepage behavior also included suspicious inline scripts and substantial post-interaction DOM changes, which require security treatment as more than ordinary portfolio functionality. No identity inconsistency or explicit brand impersonation was observed, so the principal concern is the domain’s external threat reputation and observed behavior rather than a demonstrated conflict between named legal entities.
- The homepage presents “23 Designs” as Dave Caselli’s personal 3D animation portfolio, with no login form, hidden sensitive form, wallet connection, or financial offer detected.
- External reputation checks recorded 10 malicious and 1 suspicious detections; Fortinet and Sophos were among the flagged vendors, and the domain was listed by two blacklist sources.
- Browser behavior recorded 2 suspicious inline scripts and a maximum post-interaction DOM difference of 709 elements across two successful runs.
- The site’s homepage links to portfolio, reel, about, and contact pages and contains no observed brand-impersonation indicator.
Regulatory Verification Notes
The available content is consistent with a freelance creative-services website rather than a financial, investment, or otherwise regulated offering. The about and homepage material identifies Dave Caselli and describes animation, motion graphics, and retouching services, but the available evidence does not independently verify that real-world identity; the identity assessment remains probable rather than proven. No regulatory license claim or license number is presented, although licensing would not ordinarily be expected for the stated creative-services model. Establishment signals include a long-lived domain, meaningful archival continuity, and valid transport encryption, but these signals do not neutralize the confirmed external reputation issue. A separate broker-reputation dataset produced no matching broker record.
- Domain registration telemetry records creation on 2005-04-13 and an age of 21.36 years; registrar: Bluehost Inc.
- Web archives record 73 snapshots from 2002-09-25 through 2025-02-27, covering 24 tracked years.
- Hosting telemetry identifies AS46606, Unified Layer, US; TLS uses issuer YR2 with DV validation and is valid to 2026-09-29.
- The about page states that Dave Caselli is a 3D animator in Atlanta specializing in 3D animation, motion graphics, and retouching.
What to Verify Next
Before any engagement beyond passive review, the proposed client or counterparty should independently confirm that Dave Caselli and the portfolio ownership correspond to a real person through an offline or previously trusted channel. Any commercial engagement should use a contract, independently verified contact details, and payment protections that do not depend solely on information supplied by the site. If a regulated service is later proposed, the relevant jurisdictional registry should be checked directly; such a proposal would not match the business model currently presented.
- The contact page is intended for hiring and supplies direct contact details rather than an authenticated client portal.
- The portfolio and reel pages contain dated project entries and named work examples, including “Transformer,” “Cartoon Network’s Sky Rover,” “Simoniz,” “ProMach,” and “Delta.”
- The site links to Facebook and X profiles, providing potential secondary channels for independent identity corroboration.
Summary Verdict
The overall posture is critical and unsuitable for sensitive interaction. The website may represent a genuine personal creative portfolio, but the available evidence does not establish that legitimacy strongly enough to overcome the confirmed external threat contradiction. Passive, non-sensitive review is the only supported use posture.
Infrastructure Integrity
The site resolves directly through Unified Layer infrastructure rather than a detected CDN or WAF edge, with likely origin addresses visible in the resolution results. This provides less intermediary shielding than a conventional reverse-proxy deployment; infrastructure protection should therefore be treated only as a limited mitigating consideration, not as evidence of legitimacy.
- Infrastructure resolution identified 4 likely origin IP addresses and 0 CDN edge IP addresses.
- No CDN was detected in the infrastructure results; the hosting environment was resolved in the United States.
Closing Assessment
Until the operator and engagement channels are independently validated, interaction should remain limited to passive inspection; credentials, payment information, and other sensitive data should not be submitted.
Written analysis generated 2026-08-18 by the TrustSniffer Analysis Engine from the evidence in this report.
What the analysis found
2 findings contributed to this verdict, raised by registration and ownership, analysis engine, behaviour in a sandbox, external reputation.
01 Governance Risk
- The public registration record for this domain is incomplete.Registration and ownership
rule:KF_WHOIS_INCOMPLETE
02 Sensitive Interaction Risk
- The analysis matched a pattern TrustSniffer treats as a direct threat to a visitor.Analysis engine
signal:direct_threat - The page carried inline scripts written in a style TrustSniffer treats as suspicious.Behaviour in a sandbox
rule:BEHAV_SUSPICIOUS_INLINE_SCRIPTS - The structure of the page changed sharply while it was loading.Behaviour in a sandbox
rule:BEHAV_DOM_DENSITY_SPIKE - 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 | LIKELY |
|---|---|
| Identity score | 73/100 |
| Identity verification confidence | 74% |
- Trusted social count=1
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 23designs.net.
- The request stayed on 23designs.net. It was not redirected to another domain. Clear
- Registration is published under Bluehost Inc.. Clear
- DNS for this domain is served by bluehost.com, across 2 name servers. Noted
- The registration is paid up to 2029-04-13. Clear
- The earliest public archive of this site is from 2002-09-25. Clear
- It is hosted on UNIFIEDLAYER-AS-1, from a server in US. Noted
Domain intelligence
| Registrar | Bluehost Inc. |
|---|---|
| Hosting | UNIFIEDLAYER-AS-1 - Unified Layer, US |
| Country | US |
| Server IP | 173.254.16.144 |
| Name servers | NS1.BLUEHOST.COM, NS2.BLUEHOST.COM |
| SSL issuer | YR2 |
| SSL expiry | 2026-09-29 |
| Domain age | 23.89 years (continuous registration) |
| Domain expiry | 2029-04-13 |
| Archive first seen | 2002-09-25 |
| Archive snapshots | 73 |
| 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 23designs.net 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.