Is bit.ly/payenergybill legitimate?

Many of you will probably be asking whether the sms that you received from Synergy was really from Synergy. It says something like this

Hi there. This is a friendly reminder to pay $X for account _______ by 30/08 to avoid late fees. Pay online at bit.ly/payenergybill Payment no. ____

The question is while we probably found getting a link like bit.ly/payenergybill, which is easy to remember, it is also easy to hoax. If a scammer uses a similar link (eg changing one letter to capitals such as bit.ly/Payenergybill) to redirect to their own website, they could potentially steal customer credit card numbers etc. In this case, we know that the bit.ly/link is legitimate, but it can be easily faked. A better way would be using their own domain and make a redirect from www.synergy.com/pay for example.

You can always find out where a bit.ly/link goes by adding a + at the end of the web address ie bit.ly/link+ From this you can see that almost 50,000 people have used the Synergy bit.ly/link to get to their bill.