The technique is called link manipulation.

Quick Scoop

When an attacker sends you a link that looks harmless (for example, a normal-looking URL or a button like “Update your account”) but actually sends you to a malicious website, that social engineering technique is known as link manipulation. The whole idea is to disguise the true destination of the link so you trust it and click.

How attackers manipulate links

Common tricks include:

  • Making the clickable text look like a legitimate site (e.g., www.yourbank.com) while the hidden URL goes somewhere else.
  • Hiding malicious parts of the URL using encoding, extra characters, or misleading prefixes so filters — and humans — don’t notice.
  • Using redirects: a link may start at a real, trustworthy domain and then silently forward you to a phishing or malware site.

In security training and cert-style questions, this pattern of “a link that appears harmless but leads to a malicious website” maps to link manipulation as the named technique.

“Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.”

TL;DR: A technique when an attacker sends a link that appears harmless but leads to a malicious website is called link manipulation.