Phishing attack that uses Unicode characters to fake a domain name.
The xn-- prefix is what is known as an ‘ASCII compatible encoding’ prefix. It lets the browser know that the domain uses ‘punycode’ encoding to represent Unicode characters. In non-techie speak, this means that if you have a domain name with Chinese or other international characters, you can register a domain name with normal A-Z characters that can allow a browser to represent that domain as international characters in the location bar.
What we have done above is used ‘e’ ‘p’ ‘i’ and ‘c’ unicode characters that look identical to the real characters but are different unicode characters. In the current version of Chrome, as long as all characters are unicode, it will show the domain in its internationalized form.