The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

https://creepylink.com/

by dreadsword • 6 months ago

807 148 6 months ago

creepylink.com

dreadsword• 6 months ago

Saw this on relaunched Digg and figured HN would appreciate it.

koakuma-chan2• 6 months ago

I don't appreciate how AI generated this website looks.

4k93n2• 6 months ago

which bit are you getting an AI smell from?

nimih• 6 months ago

It seems appropriate that, for a website whose purpose is to make links which raise your suspicions, the visual design itself also raises your suspicions.

olyjohn• 6 months ago

Just looks like every other generic framework oriented site.

bundie• 6 months ago

Digg is back?

Edit: looks like you need an invite code.

Bummer

qweiopqweiop• 6 months ago

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time

awesome_dude• 6 months ago

For humour I shortened "https://www.facebook.com/"

And got https://twitter.web-safe.link/root_4h3ku0_account_verificati...

vanc_cefepime• 6 months ago

I added google.com and it spit out https://twitterDOTc1icDOTlink/install_Jy7NpK_private_videoDOTzip

Interesting that it spit out a .zip url. Was not expecting that so I changed all the “.” to “DOT” so I don’t get punished for posting a spammy link despite this literally being a website to make links as spammy and creepy as possible.

bmacho• 6 months ago

punished by whom?

gnabgib• 6 months ago

Related: A URL shortener not shortening the URL but makes it look very dodgy (434 points, 2023, 100 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34609461

Bengalilol• 6 months ago

The key point here is "not shortening"

vedmakk• 6 months ago

That's less a URL shortener and more a URL dodgifier.

tylervigen• 6 months ago

To be fair, the one in the OP also did not shorten any of the links I gave it.

CrimsonCape• 6 months ago

It is hilarious and i'm not clicking any link lol.

domoregood• 6 months ago

For funsies I shortened https://creepylink.com

And got: https://c1ic.link/account_kPvfG7_download_now.bat

hahahahhaah• 6 months ago

Squared:

https://c1ic.link/ad_k9OFWW_redeem_gift.bat

archb• 6 months ago

I also tried that and got https://twitter.web-safe.link/BUuLrg_document.zip

champagnepapi• 6 months ago

https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/G4JQKX_money_request.dll

html5cat• 6 months ago

well played sir

reincarnate0x14• 6 months ago

https://jpmorgan.web-safe.link/flash_7KzCZd_money_request

I love this version and I hope you do too.

fancychancy• 6 months ago

Haha, it's fun. Just thinking, is there some place where creepy links would be better ?

AnotherGoodName• 6 months ago

I've been at a company that internally sends out fake links that log the user and links to an educational page on internet safety.

I honestly don't mind too much since it's a once a year thing (hacktober) and honestly companies should be trying to catch out employees who click any and all links.

trollbridge• 6 months ago

We used to have fun hammering millions of requests to such URLs from a VPS when they would send such emails to role mailboxes.

Eventually we got asked to please make it stop. I asked them to please stop sending fake phishing emails to robots.

CGMthrowaway• 6 months ago

Use case? Besides humor and phishing tests

cr125rider• 6 months ago

Fun!

bityard• 6 months ago

IIRC, shadyurl was the original version of this. Doesn't seem to be around anymore, though.

nomel• 6 months ago

shadyurl a whole bunch of different incredibly shady domains that were used at random. it was beautiful.

arjvik• 6 months ago

My favorite link of all time:

https://jpmorgan.c1ic.link/logger_zcGFC2_bank_xss.docm

Definitely not meta

fuddle2• 6 months ago

Imagine using this as your personal website lol

morshu9001• 6 months ago

email too

cuechan• 6 months ago

With Firefox on Android it simply says

Deceptive site issue

This web page at [...] has been reported as a deceptive site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

What's going on? I can't find any setting to disable this.

Yeri• 6 months ago

NextDNS is blocking it too (https://google.c1ic.link/lottery_qrdLCz_account_verification). The reason is that Google Safe Browsing considers that site as unsafe.

bmitch3020• 6 months ago

I was able to get past that (Firefox on the Desktop) by clicking the "see details" button and then clicking the "ignore the risk" link. It took me a while to actually read the text too.

deltarholamda• 6 months ago

I got one where the called script ended in ".pl" and I had a flashback to the 90s. My trousers grew into JNCOs, Limp Bizkit started playing out of nowhere and I got a massive urge to tell Slashdot that Alan Thicke had died.

pabs3• 6 months ago

Please don't make any more URL shorteners, they are just a bad idea.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

aussieguy1234• 6 months ago

I always end up making my own, they're so simple to write.

Saves using one of the "free" ones which looks like its free but you're actually on a free trial, then you can't access your links after that trial expires.

blenderob• 6 months ago

Way to miss the point of the project!

postalcoder3• 6 months ago

There may actually be some utility here. LLM agents refuse to traverse the links. Tested with gemini-3-pro, gpt-5.2, and opus 4.5.

edit: gpt-oss 20B & 120B both eagerly visit it.

devsda2• 6 months ago

I wish this came a day earlier.

There is a current "show your personal site" post on top of HN [1] with 1500+ comments. I wonder how many of those sites are or will be hammered by AI bots in the next few days to steal/scrape content.

If this can be used as a temporary guard against AI bots, that would have been a good opportunity to test it out.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714

jnrk• 6 months ago

Of course, the downside is that people might not even see your site at all because they’re afraid to click on that suspicious link.

xlii• 6 months ago

I posted my site on the thread.

My site is hosted on Cloudflare and I trust its protection way more than flavor of the month method. This probably won't be patched anytime soon but I'd rather have some people click my link and not just avoid it along with AI because it looks fishy :)

testfrequency• 6 months ago

Glad I’m not the only one who felt icky seeing that post.

I agree my tinfoil hat signal told me this was the perfect way to ask people for bespoke, hand crafted content - which of course AI will love to slurp up to keep feeding the bear.

briandear• 6 months ago

How is AI viewing content any different from Google? I don’t even use Google anymore because it’s so filled with SEO trash as to be useless for many things.

kzalesak• 6 months ago

I think that something specifically intended for this, like Anubis, is a much better option.

aflukasz• 6 months ago

AI bots (or clients claiming to be one) appear quite fast on new sites, at least that's what I saw recently in few places. They probably monitor Certificate Transparency logs - you won't hide by avoiding linking. Unless you are ok with staying in the shadow of naked http.

Barathkanna• 6 months ago

Sounds like a useful signal for people building custom agents or models. Being able to control whether automated systems follow a link via metadata is an interesting lever, especially given how inconsistent current model heuristics are.

PUSH_AX• 6 months ago

LLM led scraping might not as it requires an LLM to make a choice to kick it off, but crawling for the purpose of training data is unlikely to be affected.

evilmonkey19• 6 months ago

I can confirm Mistral refuse to traverse the links

caminanteblanco• 6 months ago

I'm not sure what the use case for this is, but I've been using it as a inefficient messaging service with my girlfriend, ie:

https://c1ic.link/campaign_WxjLdF_login_page_2.bat

You seem to be able to encode arbitrary text, so long as it follows [A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+

fuddle2• 6 months ago

lol, I'm not clicking a .vbs link

jmward01• 6 months ago

This had to be done:

https://wellsfargo.c1ic.link/TODO_obfuscate_url_8wyS7G_hot_s...

bl4ckneon• 6 months ago

Thought this might be it... I clicked it anyways haha. I will need to update the Rick roll url on my nfc implant with this new link!

jhalderm• 6 months ago

Fantastic! I miss the original ShadyURL.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31386108

dieggsy2• 6 months ago

This is fun. Is it not checking for previously submitted URLs though? I can seemingly re-submit the exact same URL and get a new link every time. I would expect this to fill the database unnecessarily but I have no idea how the backend works.

saghm• 6 months ago

Am I missing something, or would these essentially be implemented via DNS records? It's not clear to me that keeping the links in a database would be necessary at all (unless the DNS records are what you mean by "database")

janwillemb• 6 months ago

DNS is only for resolving the host part. The path is not passing through a dns query.

In example.com/blah, the /blah part is interpreted by the host itself.

And apart from that I would indeed consider DNS records a database.

hinkley• 6 months ago

I got https://microsoft.web-safe.link/cZ17Xn_claim_gift_card.msi for this article. What do you get?

dieggsy2• 6 months ago

Just resubmit it, you'll probably get a new link. I get something different every time.

abhinai• 6 months ago

Please take my upvote. :)

lzap• 6 months ago

I like how old-school HN comment section does not care about creepy links at all. Or link for that matter.

zakki• 6 months ago

Is this suspicious: https://microsoft.c1ic.link/0B7jqd_invoice.vbs ?

jimnotgym• 6 months ago

I think Microsoft have their own version of this

Msn.com Office.com Sharepoint.com Hotmail.com Etc, plus all the subdomains they insert before them. It makes it very easy to create phishing emails that look plausible.

Zambyte2• 6 months ago

microsoftonline.com is one of my favorites. Like how can you look any more scammy :D

FuturisticLover• 6 months ago

I am sharing content using these creepy links to send to office people.

qnleigh• 6 months ago

What's up with the creepy ads on this website? It seems like they are actually sketchy ads and not just fake ads for comedic effect. One shows some scammy nonsense about your device being infected and the other links to a real VPN app.

HPsquared• 6 months ago

That's just the ambient creepiness of the internet. It's a creepy place!

wmeredith• 6 months ago

This is probably the result of a context based ad network serving sketchy adds because of the suspicious url content.

lzzzam• 6 months ago

I can just say thanks

juliangmp• 6 months ago

This is legit! If you disable your adblock you even get a suspicious ad

phoe-krk2• 6 months ago

I wouldn't call it a shortener, since most of the links it creates are longer than the originals.

What would be a good name here? A URL redirector?

johnisgood• 6 months ago

URL lengthener. :D

phoe-krk2• 6 months ago

Huh, https://looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo... comes to mind.

Thanks!

nephihaha• 6 months ago

Same here I took a six character url, and it turned into at least ten.

kzrdude• 6 months ago

It's an asymptotic link shortener

Retr0id2• 6 months ago

link obfuscator

rendall• 6 months ago

This is the best article on Wikipedia!

https://c1ic.link/bzSBpN_login_page_2

Edit: Chrome on Android warned me not to visit the site!

manthangupta109• 6 months ago

lol

bsza• 6 months ago

Yeah but have fun explaining yourself to the police when the author abandons the project and an actual scammer ends up buying up all those domains.

victorevogor• 6 months ago

Just wondering. so you bought c1ic.link and web-safe.link. That's very cool

dizhn• 6 months ago

Firefox is freaking out on some of these. It's hilarious.

vhurg• 6 months ago

Please don’t use 3rd party relays for your URLs. It’s bad enough to have your own server, domain, etc. as single points of failure and bottlenecks without adding a 3rd party into the mix, who either themselves or someone that takes over their domain later track users, randomly redirect your users to a malicious site, or just fail.

I know people have fond memories of long ago when they thought surely some big company’s URL shortener would never be taken down and learned from that when it later was.

SilasX• 6 months ago

This! I've run into very frustrating examples of legit sites doing that, for no defensible reason at all.

For example, the healthcare.gov emails. For links to that domain, they would still transform them with lnks.gd, even though:

1) The emails would be very long and flashy, so they're clearly not economizing on space.

2) The "shortened" URL was usually longer!

3) That domain doesn't let you go straight to the root and check where the transformed URL is going.

It's training users to do the very things that expose them to scammers!

latexr7• 6 months ago

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make something useless for fun, it’s an interesting idea.

But what I’d like to understand is why there are so many of the same thing. I know I’ve seen this exact idea multiple times on HN. It’s funny the first time, but once it’s done once and the novelty is gone (which is almost immediately), what’s the point of another and another and another?

amne• 6 months ago

I think it's just someone learning something new most of the time.

I have home made url shorteners in go, rust, java, python, php, elixir, typescript, etc. why? because I'm trying the language and this kind of project touches on many things: web, databases, custom logic, how and what design patterns can I apply using as much of the language as I can to build the thing.

latexr7• 6 months ago

Right. But the question is why redo the exact same joke? Why not come up with another twist (like the URL lengthener) or do no twist but be useful?

I’m not criticising the author or anyone who came before. I’m trying to understand the impetus between redoing a joke that isn’t yours. You don’t learn anything new by redoing the exact same gag that you wouldn’t learn by being even slightly original or making the project truly useful.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. You could make e.g. a Fonzie URL shortener (different lengths of “ayyyyy”), or an interstellar one (each is the name of a space object), or a binary one (all ones and zeroes)… Each of those would take about the same effort and teach you the same, but they’re also different enough they would make some people remember them, maybe even look at the author and their other projects, instead of just “oh, another one of these, close”.

victords• 6 months ago

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

latexr7• 6 months ago

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

I agree. But a URL shortener with a twist isn’t just fun, it’s funny. The joke—as opposed to the usefulness—is what’s interesting about it. But when the same joke is overdone, it’s no longer funny.

building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632329

meken2• 6 months ago

I’ve been browsing this site for a decade plus and this idea was new to me. Maybe the author is in the same boat.

Edit: I see referencnes to shadyurl in the comments and I have heard of that, but probably wouldn’t have thought of it.

latexr7• 6 months ago

Fair. I’d think they would look for prior work beforehand, but that’s perfectly valid.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Again, this was not a criticism, but a genuine question.

cubefox2• 6 months ago

One reason is that not all these websites manage to make equally "creepy" links, even though the basic idea is the same. I remember one version which was a lot more alarming than the current example, with links containing a mix of suspicious content hinting at viruses, phishing, piracy/warez sites, pornography (XXX cams), and Bitcoin scams. I don't remember that website, but the current case seems rather weak by comparison.

latexr7• 6 months ago

That makes it even more confusing. If you’re making something creepy, I can see the argument for “whatever exists isn’t creepy enough, I’ll do it better” but not the reverse.

abustamam• 6 months ago

I actually forgot that this had been done before until you mentioned it.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, they may have not seen it before, or was bored and just wanted to make a toy.

And it seems like many in HN are in enough a similar boat to me to have up voted it to trending, so at least some people found it entertaining, so it fulfilled its purpose I suppose.

It's a good question though, and I don't think anyone really knows the answer.

asynchronous13• 6 months ago

The author posted this project on reddit a few days ago where they mentioned their motivation: "I have a coworker who is constantly talking about the glory days of ShadyUrl, but that website has been down for several years at this point, so I figured I would create an alternative."

neuroelectron• 6 months ago

/instagram.c1ic.link/mCLIIp_free_vacation_offer.zip

virajk_31• 6 months ago

why do creepy links look creepy?...

zX41ZdbW• 6 months ago

I would also like to have something like this, but for "vintage" links - something that looks like it was from the late 90s.

I use them in tests, just for fun: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/blob/master/tests/q...

eythian• 6 months ago

There was a "shadyurl". The site itself seems to be long gone, but this'll give you some context: https://www.mikelacher.com/work/shady-url/

Retr0id2• 6 months ago

There's an example shadyurl link in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14628529

Funnily enough the domains appear to have been bought up and are now genuinely shady.

TomMasz• 6 months ago

This is great. It created a link to my personal site that Firefox blocked me from going to.

codemogul• 6 months ago

BRILLIANT! Even Chrome says nope/DANGEROUS to a creepified link to mail.google.com

CupricTea• 6 months ago

The other day in a Facebook Messenger group chat I tried to link to https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ as a joke, but Messenger kept blocking it. It's quite overzealous with its blocking.

Avamander• 6 months ago

It would've been top-notch if it actually sometimes just used Outlook/O365 or similar vendor's "safelinks" redirector that they use.

falsedev• 6 months ago

I can't tell if the website works as advertised because I don't want to open the generated links

thimkerbell• 6 months ago

Add this to "HN for psychopaths" please.

danielpetrica• 6 months ago

As someone who built a standard shortener (coz.jp), this is hilarious. I spent so much time trying to make links look trustworthy; doing the exact opposite is a surprisingly fun concept.

tcgv• 6 months ago

Hole in one!

I shortened a link and when trying to access it in Chrome I get a red screen with this message:

  Dangerous site
  Attackers on the site you tried visiting might trick you into installing software or revealing things like your passwords, phone, or credit card numbers. Chrome strongly recommends going back to safety.

zefhous• 6 months ago

My city utility provider used secured-server.biz for billing for a long time. I always thought it was hilarious and very suspicious looking.

yc784567• 6 months ago

This is cool, since the links are actually short, but for properly suspicious links I prefer phishyurl [1] .

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45295898

edit: fixed typo

autoexec• 6 months ago

Every URL shortener is suspicious.

While this seems like it would make it harder for them I wouldn't be surprised if scammers eventually try to abuse this service too and I have no doubt that people would happily click these if they found in them in a phishing email, that said I give the folks behind this a lot of credit for having a way to contact them and report links if that happens.

unnouinceput• 6 months ago

My link: https://update.web-safe.link/iy1bxm_money_request

snehalbaghel• 6 months ago

Imagine someone compromises apps like these and replaces the creepy looking links to actually dangerous links

arthurezende• 6 months ago

It's so creepy my corporate VPN blocked it

lasgawe• 6 months ago

haha I love this

The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

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