It could also easily be used for phishing or IP logging purposes. Poor attempt though, almost everyone is now aware of unicode in domain names, and anyone techie enough would be able to spot it.

I don’t agree. I think almost every _technical_ user is aware of this practice, but I don’t think generally it’s understood.

That said, I think it’s mostly ineffective because later versions of chrome are pretty good about identifying these doppelgänger domains and warning people away from them.

Yet, I feel not everyone is technically literate enough.

This could very be a risk. I was using Chrome when I found this out, I wasn't given any such warning.

It'd be good with chrome can offer some discouragement to these.

I could see that easily being missed, it's not displayed as punycode in the firefox url bar.

One can simply set network.IDN_show_punycode to true in their about:config

That’s not a redirect btw, it’s the same domain. The xn—- prefix indicates Unicode encoding