URL shorteners were invented to enable users to post URLs in messages where they only have a limited number of tokens to send (e.g. Twitter) Shortened URLs were used to circumvent blacklists, beautify links you would normally never had clicked and fool people into thinking they were visiting a site while it was just an imitation. Scammers have been known to use this technique to trick their victims into visiting sites. Shortening services and encoded search engine URLs can be used to obfuscate URLs.”]
Source: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2015/09/obfuscated-urls-where-is-that-link-taking-you/