Lookalike-Domain and Brand-Impersonation Monitoring for Credit Unions

Your members trust your name. Fraudsters know it, and they register domains that imitate your credit union to harvest logins, send spoofed emails, and reroute member funds. VigilDNS watches for those domains continuously and hands you the evidence, starting at $79 a month with no sales call.

The threat aimed at credit unions

The NCUA has warned that fraudsters spoof credit union websites, and even the NCUA's own site, using addresses that look official but carry a subtle change: a zero in place of a letter O, an extra word, or a different suffix. Members who land on one of these pages enter their online-banking credentials directly into an attacker's hands. From there the path is familiar: account takeover, fraudulent wire and ACH requests, and emails that appear to come from your domain.

Here is the part most typo-checkers miss. A large share of financial-institution impersonation does not rely on a misspelling of your name at all. Attackers register generic-looking domains that combine words like "secure," "login," "verify," or "alerts" with your brand, for example yourcu-secure.com or login-yourcu.net. This is called combosquatting, and it is why monitoring built only on typo permutations leaves the most common attacks invisible. VigilDNS leads with combosquatting and page-level clone detection, not just typos.

Why credit unions are targeted, and underserved

Credit unions are member-facing, trusted, and community-rooted, which is exactly what makes your brand worth imitating. You are also fraud-focused and budget-aware, often buying through a league or cooperative. FFIEC examination expectations increasingly treat domain and brand-impersonation monitoring as part of a sound information-security program, yet the vendors built for it are priced for national banks. VigilDNS is built for institutions your size.

What VigilDNS watches for you

• Combosquatting and keyword lookalikes: brand-plus-keyword domains like yourcu-secure.com that typo tools ignore, plus homoglyphs and 13 permutation techniques in total.
• Page screenshots with side-by-side clone detection: we capture the live page and flag when it copies your member login or homepage, the clearest signal of an active phishing site.
• Lookalikes with a working mail server (MX): more than a third of registered lookalikes we monitor have one (September 2026). A lookalike set up for email is the kind used to spoof your staff and members, so we flag it; a null MX, which declares that a domain accepts no email, is not counted. See SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
• Certificate history and live TLS for every lookalike: we record the certificates each lookalike holds, and a freshly issued certificate raises its risk, sometimes before any page is up. See how Certificate Transparency works.
• AI threat verdicts: every finding is risk-scored, and the higher-risk ones get an intent label, a confidence level, and a plain-language rationale, so your small team triages the real threats first.
• Campaign clustering, dormant-threat detection, RDAP data, alerts on your plan's scan schedule, one shared tenant for your colleagues, and CSV and JSON exports.

What we do not do

VigilDNS is detection and evidence, not a managed service. We do not file takedowns for you. Instead we assemble an evidence package, screenshots, certificate records, RDAP ownership data, and our verdict, and prepare takedown-ready drafts that you or your counsel send to registrars and hosts from your own mail. See how domain takedowns work. We cover lookalike domains and the websites on them; we do not monitor social media accounts, marketplace listings, or the dark web. We do the lookalike-domain layer thoroughly and stay in our lane.

Priced for a credit union, not an enterprise

Enterprise brand-protection platforms are quote-only and routinely land in five figures a year. Free typo tools detect names but give you no evidence, no scoring, and no clone detection. Almost nothing sits in between. VigilDNS does: published pricing starting at $79 a month for the Starter plan (5 domains, 3 seats, 24-hour scans), $199 for Team (20 domains, 10 seats, 12-hour scans), and $899 for Business (100 domains, 25 seats). Annual billing includes two months free. You can start today, self-serve, without a procurement cycle or a sales call.

Frequently asked questions

Will VigilDNS catch domains that do not contain a misspelling of our name?

Yes, and this matters because most financial-impersonation domains are not simple typos. Our engine prioritizes combosquatting, brand-plus-keyword names like yourcu-login.com, alongside homoglyphs and typo variants, then captures the live page to check for a clone of your member login.

Does this help with our FFIEC and NCUA examinations?

Continuous lookalike-domain monitoring with documented findings supports the brand-impersonation and member-protection expectations examiners ask about. VigilDNS gives you dated records, risk scores, and exportable evidence you can show.

Can you take the fake sites down for us?

We produce the evidence package and a takedown-ready draft of the abuse report, but we do not file or send anything. You or your counsel send it, backed by our screenshots, certificate data, and RDAP records. Many credit unions handle this in-house or through their league counsel.

How fast can we start?

Immediately. Run the free checker on your domain right now, then subscribe online. No demo or sales call is required.

See what is already registered against your name with our free typosquat checker, then review plans on the pricing page. Community bank? See community bank brand protection.