I saw an example of that with shellscript files you're supposed to run with 'curl http://example.com/script.sh | sh' or something, where if you pipe it to cat instead, it looks harmless enough, because it contains control characters that erase the dangerous parts. So you have to download the script, and load it up in an editor before you can see what it actually does.
...which of course is so much work that noone does it.
...which of course is so much work that noone does it.