How come we get referral traffic from Example.com??

We recently got a significant amount of referral traffic coming to our website simplea.com from example.com. As example.com is a placeholder website with no external links on it, how come we’re getting traffic from example.com??

Is this a spambot faking the origin? And more importantly is there a way to avoid this (other than creating a filter for unwanted traffic?

Thanks for any clarification

Some sites share articles of other websites. It can be one such website. Or it could have one such website in past and now they removed that content so you are not seeing the links.