Spammers are notorious for being annoying, obnoxious, and can be an absolute destructive force hidden behind the cloak the protection of a keyboard, monitor and computer gives them. Despite how absolutely frustrating getting spam emails and spam pop-ups can be, you have to hand it to the spammer in the mask. They are usually technological geniuses and extremely clever, able to do things with a computer that most others couldn’t. One such ability that any spammer must have is that ability to cloak the address, the URL that they are sending you to when you click on their link.

Instead of use a normal URL, such as http://www.insert-domain-name-here.com, a spammer will hide his web address behind a string of numbers. This might look something like: http://83458937892/?. At first glance, it looks like nothing but a randomly written line of numbers that couldn’t possibly go anywhere. They didn’t even care to specify whether it was a .com or .net or .org address. Upon further inspection, one could deduct it is a valid link and will take you just where that spammer wanted you to go. He has successfully tricked you by hiding his real domain name.

So why do spammers do this? It is simple. They don’t want you to know who they are. If they give you their real domain name, you could figure out who they are with a “WhoIs” search. Much of what spammers do can be considered against the law, so they most certainly don’t want this. Cloaking their URL like this gives them the power to go unknown.

There are several ways you can get around this to actually know the domain of the string of numbers sent to you. One involves a little complex math you can figure out with the calculator added to most computers on install. Other methods involve entering the the sting of numbers into your command line with the nslookup command. Using this you can determine the IP address as well as get a domain name.

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