Monitoring Module
See the site the way a buyer in Jakarta sees it
Geo-cloaking is a standard technique for prohibited merchants: a clean retail page for your region, a different page for the jurisdictions they actually sell into. Multi-locale scanning compares what the site serves from different regional exit points and raises an alert when they diverge.
How it works
Scan from a base locale
The crawler fetches the merchant site from a chosen base locale with the appropriate language and geography signals. This is the baseline the merchant expects you to see.
Re-scan from additional locales
The same URLs are fetched again from other regional locales with rotated exit nodes. Each locale produces its own page capture.
Compare and alert on divergence
When a page returns materially different content across locales, a multi-locale divergence alert is raised against the merchant with the list of affected pages for analyst review.
Multi-Locale Scan · Pho Minh Trading
5 localesPages re-fetched from each locale profile and compared against the base scan. Mismatches may indicate geo-targeted content or cloaking.
| Page | MY Malaysia | PH Philippines | US United States | SG Singapore | ID Indonesia |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| / | Match | Match | Match | Match | Match |
| /products | Match | Match | Match | Match | Match |
| /promotions | Match | Differs | Match | Differs | Differs |
| /vip-access | Match | Differs | Match | Differs | Differs |
Potential content variation across locales
Multi-locale scanning detected content differences on 2 page(s):
/promotions (differs in: PH, SG, ID)
/vip-access (differs in: PH, SG, ID)
This may indicate geo-targeted content or cloaking. Review the affected pages.
Cloaking is a control evasion, not a coincidence
A merchant deliberately serving different content to different regions is almost never accidental. The clean retail page is there for the acquirer and the compliance crawler. The real catalog is served to the buyers in target jurisdictions. Multi-locale scanning is specifically designed to surface that second page.
Per-locale language and geography signals
Each locale profile carries its own language preference, region header, and geographic exit point. The site cannot tell that the three requests are from the same monitoring operation. They look like three real buyers in three different countries.
Divergence goes straight to the analyst queue
When page content diverges across locales beyond a configurable threshold, an alert is raised with the affected page list, the differing versions, and the merchant profile. Analysts see exactly what changed and where it was served from.
Works with the full crawler
Multi-locale scanning is layered on top of the existing crawl pipeline. Pages are still classified, screenshots are still captured, and evidence is still retained. Geo-cloaking alerts inherit the same investigation workflow and SLA tracking as any other drift finding.
Frequently asked questions
- Which locales are available?
- The monitoring crawler can appear from Malaysia, Philippines, United States, Singapore, and Indonesia. Additional regional profiles can be added for specific portfolios.
- Does running five locales quintuple the crawl cost?
- No. Multi-locale scanning is configurable per merchant and per scan tier. Most portfolios run full multi-locale scans on a smaller high-risk cohort and a single-locale scan on standard merchants. You decide how much coverage each risk tier gets.
- What counts as content divergence?
- Divergence is measured by comparing what each locale sees. When a page is served with materially different content across locales (different categories, different language, different product listings) the platform flags it as divergence and raises an alert for analyst review.
- Can this catch merchants using JavaScript-based cloaking?
- Yes. The crawler renders JavaScript and captures the fully-rendered DOM from each locale, so client-side cloaking that only reveals itself after JavaScript execution is still visible in the comparison.