Verdict
lichess.org 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 | Lichess.org — a free, libre, open-source chess platform offering play, puzzles, study tools, tournaments, and community resources. Funding primarily through donations and merchandise; no deceptive or financial-investment 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 | 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 | 16 years oldRegistered history | Clear |
| Web archive | Archived since 20181 snapshot | Clear |
| Certificate | Encrypted connectionIssued by YE1 | 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 2018.
- No flags from the reputation services TrustSniffer consulted at assessment time.
Full analysis
Overview
Lichess.org is a free, libre, open-source chess platform offering online games, puzzles, study tools, tournaments, broadcasts, and community resources. Its apparent business model is service provision supported by donations, optional patronage, and merchandise rather than pay-to-play or financial activity.
Scam/Impersonation Risk
No blacklist, phishing, malware, or impersonation contradictions were observed. The homepage’s content, navigation, community features, and donation/merchandise model are coherent with an established chess service, while independent reputation checks were clean and the domain has a top-tier global traffic footprint. Automated interaction produced elevated external-request activity and one generic password-form signal, but page inspection found no login form, hidden sensitive form, untrusted destination, wallet activity, cloaking, or non-whitelisted external posts. A similarity heuristic associated the page with chess.com, but the evidence attributes this to content or variant similarity rather than confirmed impersonation. The available historical record shows no repurposing or semantic drift; its limited capture depth does not establish continuous archival coverage but does not create a contradiction.
- Domain registration: 2010-06-14T09:06:45Z; age 16.18 years; registrar OVH sas; expiration 2027-06-14T09:06:45Z.
- Archive record: 1 snapshot, first seen 2018-08-03T14:22:26Z and last seen 2018-08-03T14:22:26Z; 1 year tracked.
- External reputation results: 0 malicious detections, 0 suspicious detections, and 0 abuse reports; traffic rank 1150.
- The homepage capture returned HTTP status 200; page inspection recorded no red flags, no hidden forms, and no untrusted form destinations.
Regulatory Verification Notes
The available material is consistent with a non-financial community platform, so no regulated investment, brokerage, lending, or payment-service activity requiring a licensing conclusion was identified. The site does not present a licensing claim or registration number in the supplied content, and the real-world operator identity is likely but not independently verified; this is a verification limitation rather than evidence of deception. The site’s established page authority, coherent open-source positioning, clean external reputation, long registration continuity, and valid transport security collectively support an apparently legitimate and mature service.
- Served from AS16276 (OVH - OVH SAS, FR).
- TLS certificate issued by YE1, validation level DV, valid to 2026-10-31T07:48:39+00:00.
- The homepage title is “lichess.org • Free Online Chess,” with internal links to play, puzzles, study, community, blog, tools, donations, and merchandise.
- The page links to project and community destinations including GitHub, Mastodon, Discord, YouTube, Twitch, and Bluesky.
What to Verify Next
Before credential or payment interactions, an organization should independently confirm the operator identity through the site’s official legal or about materials and an appropriate external registry. For merchandise or donations, ordinary checks of merchant identity, terms, refund or return arrangements, and payment protections should be completed. Official support and community channels should be confirmed through an independently known route before relying on them for account recovery or sensitive requests.
- Operator identity is assessed as likely rather than independently verified.
- The supplied content provides no licensing or registration number for independent regulatory confirmation.
- The site exposes separate donation, patronage, merchandise, sign-in, and registration pathways, making transaction and account-policy review relevant.
Summary Verdict
The overall posture is high trust and low risk, and the available evidence is consistent with an established, apparently legitimate website. Normal browsing and ordinary platform use are supported, but the assessment does not independently prove the real-world identity of the operator.
Infrastructure Integrity
The website is protected by Cloudflare CDN/WAF infrastructure, with observed edge servers and a potential origin candidate. This provides a meaningful exposure-mitigation layer, although protective infrastructure is treated only as a mitigating security signal and not as proof of legitimacy.
Closing Assessment
Prospective users may proceed with ordinary use while completing independent identity, merchant-policy, payment-protection, and official-channel checks before submitting credentials or making payments.
Written analysis generated 2026-08-17 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 lichess.org.
- The request stayed on lichess.org. It was not redirected to another domain. Clear
- Registration is published under OVH sas. Clear
- DNS for this domain is served by cloudflare.com, across 2 name servers. Noted
- The registration is paid up to 2027-06-14. Noted
- The earliest public archive of this site is from 2018-08-03. Clear
- It is hosted on OVH, from a server in FR. Noted
Domain intelligence
| Registrar | OVH sas |
|---|---|
| Hosting | OVH - OVH SAS, FR |
| Country | FR |
| Server IP | 2001:41d0:307:b200:: |
| Name servers | dimitris.ns.cloudflare.com, serenity.ns.cloudflare.com |
| SSL issuer | YE1 |
| SSL expiry | 2026-10-31 |
| Domain age | 16.18 years (continuous registration) |
| Domain expiry | 2027-06-14 |
| Archive first seen | 2018-08-03 |
| Archive snapshots | 1 |
| 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 lichess.org 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.