Joe Borders

Marriage and Family Therapist
In Roseville and Sacramento
August 21, 2021

Scam Alert:
Text Requesting Info About Short Link
– November 13, 2021

**************It’s really important to know about these things! Please share with your colleagues and check out the other scam alerts targeting therapists that I’ve written about.*****************

This morning I received a text from someone saying

Hello, my name’s *****. My wife, saw this post on your SacWellness and she is interested about this: ****short link you should not click on!****** Can we see it today?

This seemed suspicious so I wrote back to the person and told them I don’t click on links sent to me over text and asked for the title of what they were inquiring about.

They didn’t respond. I asked another time and didn’t hear anything back from them

Later in the day I saw on facebook that another therapist and several people who followed them had received similar texts.

The Scam

NEVER click on any unfamiliar links people send to you.

This is especially important with short links. If you haven’t seen them before, short links are shorter, abbreviated links that are often used for brevity and are typically composed of random meaningless characters that lead to pages you can’t often identify until you click on them.

More about short links and how they can be harmful.

So what’s basically going on here is someone is sending texts to website owners and possibly anyone they can get a phone number for. The texts sound like potentially credible, if not badly worded contacts from potential clients. Thinking this, it would be understandable for you to click on the link they send you thinking it would be a page on your site that they’re wanting to discuss.

How to check these things.

There are many services on the internet that you can plug short links into to find out where they lead. For an example for this post I used https://wheregoes.com.  You can see the results I got below.

You can see in this image that the shortlink I was sent redirects to a url that seems really suspicious. If you want to double check the destination URL you can visit google and type it into the search bar ****not the bar at the top of your browser****,this would end up loading the link, not searching for it.

The link in question above looks like its trying to masquerade as a facebook link. It it was an actual official facebook link, it would surely show up in google…..and wouldn’t include a sequence of random numbers in the domain name :-p

It’s really important to know about these things! Please share with your colleagues and check out the other scam alerts targeting therapists that I’ve written about.