These services have been around for years: TinyURL, which was for a long time the most popular, launched in 2002 and was almost immediately adopted by pranksters. One memorable prank was the rickrolling fad, in which the prankster used various means to fool a target into clicking on a link which resulted in hearing Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The simplest Rickroll was to send an email saying something like “hey, click on this link, it’s really important!” A savvy user would move their mouse over that link to see what it is before clicking on it, but that only reveals a short URL like http://bit.ly/1628nB — no indication of the annoying final destination.