Here is a copy paste from a comment I made before on steem about phishing, but thought it would be handy here too. Btw nice article, I think people need to try educate themselves on this topic if they don't want to fall victim to phishing.

Some of the guys that do phising like do make use of url shorteners to hide the actual link. Or from what I could tell in your post they used steem markup to disguise the actual link. In the case where the use a url shortnerer for example tinyurl then you can actually check what the link redirects to by making use of curl. You can do it like this:
$ curl -I https://tinyurl.com/2fcpre6
See the output. The actual url it redirects to is in the "Location" section in the response.

This link for example was a tinyurl link for the video:"Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up". Haha I got you!


Just take in mind that tinyurl is one of many sites that people could use to shorten a url. Twitter even have their own site that they use to shorten any links posted on twitter. My curl trick should work on almost any url shortener, but if you aren't that technical I would suggest that you try:


Something you can also do if you aren't sure if a frontend/site other than steemit.com is legit or not is to use security related reputation checking site to check what other people have to say about the site. Here is a list of sites you can use to check if the site is flagged as malicious by other users or not:



(Btw I check sleemit.com and its not mentioned on any of these sites yet , unfortunately).

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