[bajsejohannes]

Personally I become more suspicious when I see these images than when they are not there. I only associate it with scammers.

But yeah, probably some real world statistics is better.

You could do the test yourself, and see if people are convinced by the image alone (even though the link only goes to for example the main page of verisign.com). I'm not sure verisign would be too happy about that, though :)