These days spammers and hackers have started troubling people by sending malicious links which redirect the users to a potential harmful site which might spread some virus or you could be redirect to a malware sites. This has happened with some of our readers when they clicked some suspicious links through messenger offline messages, twitter public timeline etc.

Short URL services which are spreading these days actually started becoming a free tool for these spammers to hide the potential harmful link by converting into a short URL. However there are various methods which can used to check before whether these links are potentially safe to click, lets discuss them one by one.

Fix:

Following are some methods discussed.

Method 1: Scan Suspicious Links With AVG Link Scanner

AVG Link Scanner is free utility from same company which distribute popular free antivirus AVG Antivirus FREE Edition. This program lets you scan any link and will tell you whether that link is safe to be clicked.

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It will also install a firefox addon which keeps a watch over all the links you click and link shown in the google search results and will display a green colored arrow if the link is safe to be clicked.

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Method 2: Decode The Actual Link Hidden In Short URL

Another way to avoid clicking dangerous links is to decode the actual link hidden in short URLs, for this you can use free services like Untiny.com and trueurl.net. Using these services you can see the link encoded in short link before opening the link in browser.

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