"Dr Oz called this the most potent erection pill. <not my name>., last up to 3 hours with no side effects" <link to spam site>
-- or --
Thank you Oprah for your appraisal: because of that we're opening a FREE sample programme for EVERYONE! <not my name>., lose 20 lbs:
At first I tried to ignore the text messages. However, I have been getting one every other day and it is starting to get old. So, I decided to do some investigating.
I hit a few of the links in the text messages with curl and to my surprise, each link redirects to https://www.google.com.
curl -v <some-site>.com/<random-characters>
* Trying <ip-address>...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to npit9.com (<ip-address>) port 80 (#0)
> GET /zFYFoXfVF8 HTTP/1.1
> Host: npit9.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< Server: nginx/1.6.2
< Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 20:19:25 GMT
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
< Connection: keep-alive
< Location: https://www.google.com
<
* Connection #0 to host <some-site>.com left intact
Here is what I know:1. Every message has a different link that is a six letter domain and the path is a series of random characters and each is addressed to a person that isn't me.
2. Every URL is registered by namecheap.com.
3. Every URL points to the same IP address.
4. Every link redirects to https://www.google.com
What can a spammer possibly gain from this?