CeeTrust started with a conversation about an aunt, who had clicked a link in a text message and lost £4,000 to a "bank security alert" that turned out to be a phishing page. I had spent a decade by then writing about retail banking and fintech, and I knew — abstractly — that phishing was a problem. Sitting in her living room helping her cancel cards, I realised I had never written anything that would have actually helped her in the moment.
The technical articles I had written were for IT readers. The bank's own advice was buried four clicks deep on a corporate website. The "five tips to avoid phishing" articles were everywhere on the open web — and none of them said the one thing that would have stopped her clicking the link: the URL in the message was not your bank.
The simplest possible idea
The plan, when I sketched it out that week, was almost embarrassingly simple. Take a list of the things people most often search for when they need to sign in to something online — bank logins, school portals, employer HR systems, hospital patient portals, government services. For each one, write a single page that says: here is the real URL, this is how to check that it is real, and this is what to do if you cannot log in. No login form. No "click here to log in" middleman page. Just the answer.
If anyone is going to host that page, it should be a person willing to put their name on it.
The editorial rules
Three rules came out of those early weeks and they have not changed since:
- Every "official site" link is verified by hand. Not by a script, not by a scrape — by reading the organisation's own website and confirming the URL is theirs. If the URL fails verification, the page is built without an official link, or skipped entirely.
- We do not host login forms. Not even a "redirect" page. If you arrive at CeeTrust looking for your bank, the only thing we want to do is get you off this site and onto your bank's actual domain. Every minute you spend on CeeTrust is a minute you are not on the page you actually need.
- We do not link to aggregators. Not "loginslink", not "ejobscircular", not "stubcreator", not "logmasuk". These sites are a category of the same problem we are trying to solve — they rank well for "X login", but the link they show you is two clicks away from the actual login page, and any of those clicks could be replaced by an ad or a redirect.
What we skip
The same week we wrote the editorial rules, we wrote a short list of categories that the site will not cover, however much traffic they might represent. Gambling portals. Adult content. Pirated streaming services. Stalkerware. Cracked-software stores. Any service whose terms of use the user is breaking by logging in.
The argument I had with myself was simple: a directory that links to a payday lender's login or a sports-betting site is technically helpful to that user — but the broader effect is to lend the lender or the bookmaker a tiny bit of credibility by association. CeeTrust is built on the opposite trade: every page is a small refusal to lend credibility to something that does not deserve it.
How to reach me
I edit this site myself. If a link is wrong, a category is misapplied, or a page should not exist at all, write to me at editorial@cee-trust.org. Reader corrections are the single best signal we get, and they are usually fixed within a few working days.
— The CeeTrust Editorial Team