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It’s actually pretty easy to create a website that pretends to be another. You can name a link whatever you want, and there are ways to spoof what a browser shows in its address bar.
Tricking people into going to a perfect replica of their bank’s website, and putting in their username/password to “log in,” is an incredibly common way of stealing someone’s real bank account, for example.
To prevent this, the internet has created ways for sites to prove they are real, with what is basically a certificate or “signature” type system. But to do this, sites have to basically buy a certificate of proof, and remember to renew that certificate every so often.
If you go to a site and get this error, it means the certificate check failed. Now, maybe it’s just because the website owner forgot to renew their certificate or messed up. But it could also mean it failed because it’s a fake site, pretending to be someone else.
So either the website owner is malicious, or incompetent. Either way, it’s not a good look.
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