Even that's not an absolute assurance, as millions of people who have failed to renew expired domains can attest. And the HTTP status codes have a whole block o

Even that's not an absolute assurance, as millions of people who have failed to renew expired domains can attest. And the HTTP status codes have a whole block of redirect codes while just about every web server permits backend proxies. When you visit http://viral.example/ http://viral.example/ it can already send you anywhere; seeing the URL http://viral.example/qr http://viral.example/qr only tells you that you're getting QR-specific content, and still does not tell you what that content is.