Grabify has a ton of helpful use cases ranging from URL shortening, marketing, tracking and analytics etc. There is no doubt that a lot of its popularity has been garnered from its use in Scambaiting and by popular Scambaiters. However, with this popularity comes a challenge with its continued use for this purpose, as scammers continue to become aware of the tool and its capabilities and actively try to avoid it.

With this challenge comes the need to seek out ways to not raise suspicions when trying to get a potential scammer to click your links. In this tutorial, we’d be exploring a suitable method for achieving this, and the good news is that we would be doing all this inside Grabify without needing to use external services.

Introducing Grabify custom links

Grabify custom links offer an enhanced way to use Grabify’s powerful tracking capabilities while providing more flexibility in how your links appear. Instead of using the default “grabify.link” domain, you can choose from a variety of alternative domains that blend seamlessly with your content. This feature is particularly useful for maintaining a natural look and feel for your links, making them less conspicuous and more engaging for your audience.

Understanding URLs(links) in general

This section is aimed at giving a little technical explanation of the building blocks of a URL or link, as a good understanding of this would help maximize your use and understanding of the Grabify custom links feature. Feel free to skip to the next section if this isn’t your thing.

In order to understand a URL(link) we’d be using the following sample URL:

`https://www.example.com/shoes?color=red`

Below are brief explanations of some of the key parts:

1. Scheme (Protocol): https://
— This indicates the protocol used to access the resource. Common schemes include http and https.

2. Domain (Hostname): www.example.com
— This is the address of the server where the resource is hosted. It typically includes a domain name and sometimes a subdomain (like www). In the case of Grabify, this would be www.grabify.link. It is worth noting that in cases where the subdomain is the default www, you can go ahead and skip that part and use either only the scheme — http or https or just the domain directly i.e example.com or grabify.link

3. Path: /shoes
— This specifies the exact location of the resource on the server. It often represents a directory or file structure. Referencing the sample URL, this is basically translates to: Go to the shoes directory/file/resource on the example.com host/server. For a typical Grabify link this is usually a random 6 digit alphanumeric e.g CUVV9T. Putting it all together that’d be https://www.grabify.link/CUVV9T.

The above are the most important parts of any URL and most URLs you’d come across, including Grabify links would most likely include/follow this pattern. However, there are other parts that come in handy and necessary for identifying or locating resources on a host/server. These includes:

4. Parameters (Query String): ?color=red
— These are key-value pairs that provide additional information to the server. They are introduced by a question mark (`?`) and separated by ampersands (`&`) in the case where there are more than one of them. In this example, `color=red` is a parameter. This basically translates to: Go to the shoes directory/file/resource on the example.com host/server, and specifically locate the shoe with the color red(assuming there is only one shoe matching this criteria).

How to create a Grabify custom link?

Here’s a step by step guide on how to create Grabify custom links.

1. Navigate to https://grabify.link and paste in the link you want to track. We’d be using https://example.com for this tutorial.

2. Click on “Create URL” and accept the terms and conditions that pop by clicking on “I Agree & Create URL”.

3. On the resulting page where you find details of your newly created link, click on the green button labelled “Change domain / make custom link”. This opens up a popup for you to customize your link.

This would open up a popup where you can now customize your link as you wish to.

4. Click on the “Domain” dropdown to see a list of all other domains that are owned by Grabify(alongside their expiry dates). This simply means that replacing grabify.link on any Grabify link you have with any of these domains will still achieve the same result and allow you see your logs. Remember the Domain part in our URL explanation above? Sweet isn’t it?

Select any from the list and observe as the link at the top of the popup changes. At this point, you can go ahead and copy and share this link as it now excludes the popular grabify.link domain while still achieving the intended result.

Remember to get as creative as possible with this. The goal is to make your link look as natural as possible. For example, say your Grabify link points to a cat image that you ask the potential scammer to checkout, it’d be intuitive to use a domain that has something to do with say image/picture/pics e.t.c, something like imagehub.fun
This applies for every other topic.

Going forward, all other steps are optional.

5. Click on the “Extension” dropdown to see a list of extensions you can add to your link. To make this makes sense, building on the already established cat image scenario above, you can select any image related extension from the list, this would be either .jpg, .gif or .png. As usual, this applies for every other topic or scenario.

6. Click on the “Path” dropdown to choose a suitable path. Refer to the URL explanation section if you need to recall what a URL path is. Still building on our cat image scenario, we can go ahead and select image from the list. Again, feel free to select whichever is best suitable for your case.

7. Click on “Parameter” dropdown to add a parameter to your link. In our case we can stick to id. Feel free to modify this as suitable.

Now we’re done customizing our link. You can now scroll back to the top of the popup to see and copy your customized link. You can alternatively click outside of the popup or on the close icon on the popup to close it and you should still find your customized link on the link details.

In our case, we should end up with: https://imagehub.fun/image.php?id=CUVV9T.jpg

Note: Your old links having the grabify.link domain would still work and continue to log information when clicked on alongside the custom one(s).

Don’t forget to share this tutorial if you enjoyed it.

Love, Grabify Team ❤️