Actually a transfer of Bitcoin to another wallet is known as transaction and once the Bitcoin is fake it won't have any confirmation from the network and once is a fake Bitcoin transaction it won't include the transaction fee.
In this regard, they are real bitcoin, but just that the scammer double-spent the coin by replacing the transaction with a higher fee and change your address to his own address.
And once again after is received in your wallet wait for 20 minutes before re-checking your blockchain wallet.
You do not have to wait 20 minutes, and you can wait longer, it depends on how congested the mempool is and when the transaction is confirmed. Once the transaction is confirmed, the coin can no more be double-spent by the scammer.
Using block explorers is never safe.
That is true, since I have been using Electrum, I do not have to make use of any block explorer, all can be seen on Electrum directly. But there are sometimes I just wanted to check txid or address of an unknown person which I am not the sender or receiver, and not running full node, so in this case, I just connect Tor to check that on blockchain explorer as I can not use light client for it.