What is deceptiveidn?

Deceptive IDN is a tool that spots fake website domains designed to trick people into thinking they're visiting a legitimate site. Scammers use internationalized domain names, which allow non-Latin characters like Cyrillic or Greek letters, to create lookalike addresses where a character that appears to be a Latin "e" or "a" is actually a different letter from another alphabet. To the human eye, the domain looks correct, but it's pointing somewhere malicious. The tool works by treating each domain name as a visual puzzle rather than just text. It renders the internationalized domain so it looks like an image, then uses optical character recognition (the same technology that extracts text from scanned documents) to "read" what the domain looks like. If the visual reading differs from the actual registered domain, it flags the domain as deceptive and lists what a person's eyes would likely interpret it as. Security teams, anti-fraud groups, and brand-protection specialists would find this most useful. For example, if a phishing campaign registers a domain that visually mimics a well-known brand like "epic.com" using Cyrillic characters, this tool can automatically detect the deception and identify the real domain the scammer is targeting. It helps catch lookalike domains before they reach end users. What's notable is the approach itself: instead of maintaining lists of which international characters look like which Latin characters, it leans on computer vision to simulate how a human would actually see the domain. The README doesn't go into detail on accuracy or limitations, so users would need to test it against their own cases to gauge how reliably it catches less obvious lookalikes.