ST. CLAIRSVILLE – Cindi Henry, auditor for Belmont County, is warning residents after discovering a fraudulent version of the county auditor’s website online.

Henry said the cloned site closely resembles the official Belmont County Auditor’s Office website but adds an “s” to the web address, changing it from “Auditor” to “Auditors.”

“Basically what it is, is the website is Belmont County Auditor not auditors. So somebody just added an S to the word auditor and when you look at it, it mimics ours,” Henry said. “It’s got all of the links that you’d go to. Theirs is more white with different things to tab on, and it looks like it’s the same information till you actually click on it and it’s not.”

Henry said the fake website appears to prevent users from accessing legitimate property information and other records available through the official site.

“They’ve basically just made a copy of it, but it’s not working,” she said. “So people that are trying to look up their properties and whatnot can’t get to our site to look them up because they’re not at the real site.”

Henry said her office contacted the Belmont County Prosecutor’s Office after discovering the cloned site because of concerns related to cybersecurity.

She said the official county auditor website is Belmontcountyauditor.org.

“When you make a website, you have to pick a domain name and you have to pay for it,” Henry said. “We paid for about six different versions of a domain name to keep somebody from doing this to us.”

Henry said the cloned site appears to use copied content from the official website but altered its appearance and functionality.

“And when you hit on the links and different things, they go nowhere,” she said. “So they basically just made this a mess.”

According to Henry, the matter has been turned over to prosecutors, who are attempting to identify whoever registered the fraudulent domain.

“They’ve reached out to the person that used that domain and it’s probably a scam,” Henry said. “What will happen is when people do this to you, they try to sell it back to you.”

Henry, who is seeking reelection in the May 5 election, said she had not initially considered whether the incident could be politically motivated.

“There’s so many different layers you go through while trying to figure out who the actual originator is,” she said. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack when trying to find who did this. It’s really hard, but I hope that the election doesn’t have anything to do with it.”