A website asks for my Social Security number just to 'check my eligibility' for a stimulus payment - is that safe?

These scam sites typically appear after news coverage of a real or rumored stimulus program, relief payment, or one-off government support scheme. They present a simple-looking 'eligibility checker' form that asks for your full Social Security number, date of birth, and sometimes bank details, supposedly just to confirm whether you qualify. In reality, the site has no connection to the government and exists purely to harvest this data for identity theft or to sell it to other criminals.

Genuine eligibility checks, when they exist at all, are conducted directly through the official government website, and generally do not require you to submit your full Social Security number to a third-party site just to see if you 'qualify' - actual payment, if due, is typically calculated automatically from your existing tax or benefits records rather than requiring you to self-report your SSN to a checker tool.

Before entering sensitive information into any eligibility checker, verify the website's domain matches the official government domain exactly, and be suspicious of any site that appeared via a social media ad or unsolicited link rather than being found by navigating the government's own official site.