This morning I got woken up by a scam text message, purportedly from +1 704 xxx xxxx congratulating me on being the WINNER OF THE DAY and that I must go to www. apple. co. nz. ultimatemobilecontest. com to claim my prize.
After bouncing redirects through servers in UK, Miami, Salt Lake City, Orlando, and back to London, I seem to be supposed to end up at ziinga (.com) which appears to be a penny auction site (possibly operated from the Virgin Islands. Maybe.) On the way I would've collected cookies from two tracking sites in the middle.
It's kind of interesting to see how these things are run. I'd imagine the first domain is a throwaway, but the ones in the middle which are collecting the tracking data might perhaps be intended to back each other up. Their names "tnktrck .com" and "trackamps .com" are suggestive of tracking, at the very least.
Where is the value, I wonder, for bouncing through so many domains? It seems fraught with reliability issues, in that I would be horrified to see a recommendation to a client to insert so many failure points into the process of redirecting an input URL to a final destination, on the other hand it's interesting that although the initial and final URLs are in the UK, all of the intermediate ones are in the US.
It might even be that the bastards who woke me up at 6:00am with this crap have nothing to do with the final destination, other than some 'partner sign up' reward that they are exploiting through a text, since I end up passing through a ziinga partners/pairs/nz/ "ewa-cpl-nz" URL on the way in.
Thankfully I don't think there's anyone in my extended family who'd even have followed the first link, let alone sign up for a dodgy penny auction site, but I do wish there were some way to stop these 'people' from waking me up in the early morning hours without limiting my ability to receive urgent wake up messages from people who have a call on breaking my sleep.
It makes me grumpy.