I received yesterday a suspicious email, because it traced to a real purchase from my fairphone account that I had already received, and contained links to a different website. The command number, my postal adress, the products, everything was correct but since the command was obsolete, my suspicions instantly pointed to a fraud through phishing email - which are really getting massive currently, if I may add.
I will report the website and contact my mail provider because it could be an interception of previous exchanges (man in the middle). I may also have to change a number of passwords. But I cannot exclude the possibility that my fairphone account could be compromised and I have difficulties to understand where to report this.
Hence the topic here. I may also be interested to know if others have encountered the same threat.
Best wishes,
Renaud
PS : the website the links point to (exponea dot com) seems to be a provider of data service for customers and sellers ; so it may only be an intermediary to a different destination. Since I am reluctant to following the link I don’t know where I would have landed so far.
PPS : so far, links signalled on Phishing Initiative
scamdoc and www.signal-arnaques.com and scamadviser
I can not issue a complaint online in France because there was no money requested from me but I can go to the police station to issue a complaint. I am not sure if it will help however.
This wasn’t from. a domain called trustpilotmail, was it?
That would be the third-party feedback “collector” that Fairphone has signed on to. I think usually it emails buyers around 14 days after an item was sent to the buyer.
No it wasn’t. I really think it was malevolent, and it didn’t mention any feedback, just (obsolete) information that my order was on its way with the illegitimate links.
Domain was https {semicolon} {slash} {slash} cdn {dot} eu1 {dot} exponea {dot} com
I am now in the process of reporting the website but it may only be used as an intermediary (see my last edit of the first message).
Yes Fairphone indeed works together with expoena (as do a lot of others). They are a legitimate service provider (more or less - I don’t trust any third party service at all but that’s on me). I too received a confirmation email about a purchase I did over a year ago. In the meantime I did several others so that was confusing for me as well. My guess is that Fairphone is (still) in the process of setting up their shop system (they promised to be ready about a year ago but you can still see that they’re not). Apparently something went wrong or at least not according to plan. I don’t think there’s anything malicious about it though. I’d just ignore it.
Either way, I do support complaining about it directly towards Fairphone as I find it troubling how much Fairphone is outsourcing all of their duties (technical support → zendesk, shop/customer experience → expoena,…)
Thanks for your insight. However how come exponea would just confirm shipment with hyperlinks all sending me through their website including the tracking link and just pasting previous elements of my order? It doesn’t make sense at all if it isn’t phishing or at least some abuse. Anyway something is not right and it is really unsettling to say the least. Regarding Fairphone I find it difficult to find a simple way to alert about a security issue regarding communication with them or with their website. You can signal various issues with shipment and with their products which is great but I didn’t find so far any method to report my problem. That too I find rather problematic but may be I didn’t watch at the right place so far.
If You have any questions about Our Privacy Policy, or wish to invoke Your legal rights, please contact us via privacy@fairphone.com. The supervisor of privacy legislation is the Authoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) or Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA). You can find the contact details of the Personal Data Authority here. in ubn
So maybe you could contact them via their privacy email address.
Thanks. I have done that. However I did use their support forms on the basis of the order I had passed and that was used to send me a suspicious email and pasted the source code of the message with it. I used the following answer to one of their questions Why do you need help with your product? I experience a problem / My product is broken
Indeed my product isn’t broken but I do experience a problem.
And I encouraged them to point me to the right procedure because using their support forms doesn’t point to any obvious way to adress security or website issues.
Here is my message :
I am sorry to report (potentially) through the wrong procedure and I would be thankful if you would show me how to report my issue properly but I received an email regarding this order yesterday which I found suspicious because it announced that my parcel had been sent and pointed all its links towards the same adress through exponea dot com
Of course, beside the suspicious hyperlinks the fact that I had already received the ordered items and that phishing attacks tend to be more and more massive nowadays increased my mistrust
So I didn’t follow the links, changed various passwords, reported a phishing attempt on various platforms, including fairphone forums, where someone wrote me that your firm had indeed worked with exponea
But even if it is the case I don’t get why exponea would send me an email pointing to their website in order to track a command that I already received so may be a different person or entity is currently trying to use exponea as an intermediary to scam people. In this case, they would have intercepted previous emails I received or sent or hacked my email account or my fairphone account. Hence the changing of passwords. Il will now attach the source of the email that I consider to be phishing email.
Thanks in advance if you can check what may be happening. Event if you have some relation with exponea the email I received seem not to be a fair use of my data or yours.