Verdict
abe.co.nz appears legitimate.
Our checks found nothing pointing to fraud. Ordinary care still applies when you pay or sign in.
| What this site appears to be | Commercial website for Auto Body Equipment Ltd (New Zealand) offering products, training and a B2B ordering platform. Includes product listings, contact information, physical address and phone numbers. |
|---|
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 | None flagged itVirusTotal | Clear |
|---|---|---|
| Google Safe Browsing | Not listedGoogle | Clear |
| Abuse reports on the host | 0 reportsAbuseIPDB; shared hosting inflates this count | Noted |
| Domain age | 26 years oldRegistered history | Clear |
| Web archive | Archived since 2004Public history exists | Clear |
| Certificate | Encrypted connectionIssued by YE2 | Noted |
The page as captured
Key findings
- Automated classification: Not Scam.
- Domain age: more than 10 years (registration continuity).
- Public web-archive history exists since 2004.
- No flags from the reputation services TrustSniffer consulted at assessment time.
Full analysis
Overview
Auto Body Equipment is a New Zealand commercial website for collision-repair professionals, presenting a public catalogue and B2B ordering service for spraybooths, welders, lifts and jacks, consumables, air tools, training, servicing, and related workshop equipment. Its apparent business model is the sale and distribution of collision-repair equipment and supplies to trade customers.
Scam/Impersonation Risk
No contradictions were observed across the supplied evidence: there is no phishing, impersonation, conflicting legal-identity, malicious-detection, or external threat signal. The homepage presents a coherent commercial proposition, while the products, training, service, contact, and ordering functions are consistent with an established B2B distributor rather than a deceptive or high-risk interaction model. The site's behavior was stable, with no login capture, hidden form, wallet activity, cloaking, clipboard manipulation, or suspicious script activity detected. The apparent legitimacy is strong, but the real-world operator identity remains independently unverified.
- The homepage identifies the business as Auto Body Equipment and presents collision-repair categories, services, training, and a product catalogue.
- The contact and service pages provide business contact details, a physical address, and telephone numbers.
- Domain registration: 2000-07-14T02:18:14Z; registered 2000 (~26.12 years old).
- Web history records 125 archive snapshots spanning 2004–2026 (23 years tracked), with no suspicious repurposing or semantic drift identified.
Regulatory Verification Notes
The site presents itself as Auto Body Equipment Ltd and supplies business-facing contact and location information, supporting a clear commercial identity on the website. No financial, investment, or other regulated-service offering is indicated, and no regulatory licence claim is made in the supplied pages; this is therefore a disclosure point for ordinary merchant and corporate verification, not evidence of deception. Available external reputation checks were clean, and no relevant broker-dataset match was identified. The site should consequently be described as apparently legitimate and evidence-consistent with an established business, rather than as having a proven operator identity or independently verified regulatory status.
- The About and homepage content describe Auto Body Equipment as a New Zealand importer and distributor of collision-repair equipment.
- The contact page includes a physical business address and telephone contact details.
- The site's registrar is 1st Domains Limited.
- The site's TLS certificate is issued by YE2, uses Domain Validation (DV), and is valid to 2026-10-16T23:36:16+00:00.
What to Verify Next
Before a credential or payment interaction, an enterprise or purchaser should independently confirm the presented legal entity through the relevant New Zealand corporate registry, review the applicable returns and warranty terms, and confirm payment-protection arrangements for higher-value orders. Contact details should also be validated through an independent business directory, supplier record, or offline channel rather than relying solely on the website.
- The site contains a single contact form and no detected login or password-collection form.
- The ordering model includes both a public product catalogue and B2B account ordering, making merchant-identity and commercial-terms checks directly relevant to prospective purchasers.
Summary Verdict
The overall posture is high trust and low apparent risk, supported by converging evidence of a long-running commercial presence, coherent business content, clean technical and external-reputation signals, and stable site behavior. The evidence is consistent with an established, apparently legitimate website, while operator identity is not independently verified.
Infrastructure Integrity
The site is hosted directly on UPCLOUD — UpCloud Ltd, Finland, without a detected CDN or WAF layer; two likely origin addresses were identified. This is a conventional hosting posture and does not itself indicate maliciousness, although it provides less edge-layer mitigation than a CDN-fronted deployment.
- Hosted on AS202053 (UPCLOUD - UpCloud Ltd, FI); no CDN detected, with 2 likely origin IPs.
- The site's transport encryption uses a DV TLS certificate issued by YE2, valid to 2026-10-16T23:36:16+00:00.
Closing Assessment
Normal browsing and ordinary commercial engagement are proportionate to the assessed posture, with independent merchant-identity, contractual, and payment-protection checks completed before credentials or payment details are submitted.
Written analysis generated 2026-08-22 by the TrustSniffer Analysis Engine from the evidence in this report.
What the analysis found
No rule findings contributed to this verdict.
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 abe.co.nz.
- The request stayed on abe.co.nz. It was not redirected to another domain. Clear
- Registration is published under 1st Domains Limited. Clear
- DNS for this domain is served by net.nz, across 2 name servers. Noted
- The earliest public archive of this site is from 2004-12-15. Clear
- It is hosted on UPCLOUD, from a server in FI. Noted
Domain intelligence
| Registrar | 1st Domains Limited |
|---|---|
| Hosting | UPCLOUD - UpCloud Ltd, FI |
| Country | FI |
| Server IP | 95.111.218.75 |
| Name servers | ns1.1stdomains.net.nz, ns2.1stdomains.net.nz |
| SSL issuer | YE2 |
| SSL expiry | 2026-10-16 |
| Domain age | 26.12 years (continuous registration) |
| Domain expiry | Not available |
| Archive first seen | 2004-12-15 |
| Archive snapshots | Not counted (archive lookup incomplete) |
| Reputation | VirusTotal: 0 flagged | AbuseIPDB: 0 reports | Google Safe Browsing: 0 matches |
About this assessment
A trust score summarises the evidence TrustSniffer could collect about abe.co.nz 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.