alt.hn

8/4/2026 at 9:09:39 PM

Thanks FedEx, This Is Why We Keep Getting Phished (2024)

 https://www.troyhunt.com/thanks-fedex-this-is-why-we-keep-getting-phished/

by stymaar

8/4/2026 at 9:57:35 PM

This is so weird, seeing this. Two years ago, I got a customs notice from FedEx asking to fill in my details. That was just a plain email from __some guy__ at FedEx with a PDF file attached. I wasn't expecting any package.

I wrote to their chatbot (of course, no human assistance) and after some time of "prompt engineering," or what one might call coercing, it finally directed me to a human consultant who confirmed it was indeed not a scam, and that it was indeed their messaging.

I opened the PDF, and it was pre-filled with someone else's data, with blank rectangles placed over fields in a bad attempt at redacting them (you could just move those rectangles around to reveal the underlying data).

The package later turned out to be a surprise from collaborators abroad. Years later, I still feel that scam aftertaste whenever I see the FedEx logo.

by lemursage

8/4/2026 at 11:26:20 PM

I've gotten the same from FedEx several times over the years. It never gets less weird.

by handedness

8/4/2026 at 9:41:43 PM

In a recent example my step-mother, who is constantly getting cloud storage full scam emails, received an email from Google about 75% full storage that appears to be fully valid. However all the links use a domain c.gle and whois c.gle errors with "getaddrinfo(whois.nic.gle): Name or service not known". whois gle however does work. I was not sure of the validity of c.gle myself, my step-mother would have no idea.

by kencausey

8/4/2026 at 11:31:28 PM

not that it really helps to know now, but .gle is a TLD operated by Google. the only domains on a .gle domain will be Google (in theory). Plus, a single letter domain (on any TLD), like c.gle would be expensive to burn on a phishing scam.

But no one should need to know this. I don't know what's so wrong about just using google.com, or even .google for anything user facing...

I understand the idea that they want an official TLD that doesn't necessarily have their trademark in it, so you know it's a link to a Google service but potentially user content, but why have c.gle links to official/urgent messaging??

(at least they don't use 1drv.com in emails like Microsoft.. seriously...)

by varun_ch

8/4/2026 at 9:52:52 PM

Whois has been replaced by RDAP.

by inigyou

8/4/2026 at 10:37:51 PM

As far as I am able to find Google does not provide an RDAP server for gle either.

by kencausey

8/4/2026 at 10:09:29 PM

There are whois servers, and the whois command, so no, it has not.

I agree that this is the goal.

by b112

8/4/2026 at 10:25:01 PM

Clearly there is not a whois server here

by inigyou

8/4/2026 at 10:56:02 PM

According to a new uncle to your comment, not whois or RDAP.

by jdiff

8/4/2026 at 9:34:53 PM

I swear, the proliferation of random ".xyz" type gTLD is not making things any easier in stopping non tech people from clicking on phishing links. There's so damn many of them. Sure, if they didn't exist people would use phishing domains like "fedex-secure-delivery-approval.com" or something, I suppose...

List of top level domains: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

by walrus01

8/4/2026 at 10:05:40 PM

I'm not convinced that would help.

The problem is that large companies and government agencies are both misusing and NOT using the appropriate trust anchor - their fucking domain.

Its just attempting to work around incompetence, which always just shows up again somewhere else.

by ddtaylor

8/4/2026 at 10:37:22 PM

> The problem is that large companies and government agencies are both misusing and NOT using the appropriate trust anchor - their fucking domain.

I think this might have some parallels with the 'shadow IT' problem in large corporations and organizations. Some work group or department or project within a very large entity decides it needs to implement something (like shipment tax payment notifications, as in the linked example) and decides to DIY it rather than going through the full process to do it with their own domain.

Reminds me a bit of large businesses where some sales or CRM-related department goes out and starts buying email-blasting/email-list features from some mailchimp-type company and only later on realizes they need to talk to whoever controls the domain to get approval for proper outbound DKIM in the DNS records, etc.

by walrus01

8/4/2026 at 11:30:25 PM

Or more likely IMO, FedEx HQ said "you can't use our domain to collect foreign tax payments" and so it got outsourced to a service in Australia. And a lot of these "collect payments as a service" sites just look and feel like something that was developed in 1995 and never updated. I run into them everywhere, from local governments to medical and legal offices, small utility companies, etc. I have no idea how they pass PCI audits.

by SoftTalker

8/4/2026 at 11:05:09 PM

The problem is that large companies and government agencies are both misusing and NOT using the appropriate trust anchor - their fucking domain.

Just today I saw an e-mail from "onmicrosoft.com" that was completely legit.

I wonder how many domains MS is running these days. It seems like each department and project gets its own.

by reaperducer

8/4/2026 at 11:12:06 PM

At least they're not sending from contoso.com ?

by walrus01

8/4/2026 at 11:33:47 PM

Every time I see a new Microsoft domain I've never seen before, I have to double check that it's actually legit. Every time I realize anew why people still fall for phishing attempts, because all these legit domains look like phishing attempts.

by Yokolos

8/4/2026 at 9:53:03 PM

The menagerie of TLDs is somewhat a necessary evil in my view. Prior to them it was becoming nearly impossible to get a decent domain, with most of them already having been laid claim to by squatters, big companies, and startups with VC money to burn.

by cosmic_cheese

8/4/2026 at 10:57:29 PM

It didn't change anything though, if you have the money you can just buy more.

by nubinetwork

8/4/2026 at 11:07:53 PM

Also this was never a real problem. "All the good names are taken" is true if you insist that every name which isn't taken is a bad name but otherwise obviously false.

The same exact "Somebody already had the good ideas, it's not my fault I'm just too late" whining can be seen centuries ago. People who live in a world with no electricity, absolutely convinced that every product which will ever be wanted already exists. Morons.

Way back in time I wrote an HN post where I just spotaneously came up with plausible 2LD names off the dome and every single one was available. I won't bother repeating the exercise because it was evident that everybody who could understand this was unsurprised while the people who'd previously believed all the good names were gone just dismissed these as bad names because after all, if they were good names they'd be taken already, duh.

by tialaramex

8/4/2026 at 11:27:30 PM

There are plenty of Chinese domains that are just numbers. If they can build entire businesses off of that, so can anybody. There's of course a ton of risk around scammers winning SEO and adwords competitions.

by linkregister

8/4/2026 at 10:07:44 PM

For the past 2 years I've gotten backscatter from a phishing campaign that uses a domain I own in the from address. Every single domain they try to get the victims to click on is a .com

The most recent one is detention-unit.com, which probably does trick a lot of the people getting these phishing emails since the targets don't seem to speak English as a first language.

As an aside, an alarming number of server admins don't check SPF so these emails are actually getting into people's inboxes.

by dqv

8/4/2026 at 9:54:00 PM

This was a calculated project by ICANN to 1. bring lots more money to ICANN and 2. prevent decentralisation of the DNS root away from the control of the USA.

by inigyou

8/4/2026 at 9:44:15 PM

There is a similar issue with the IRS. If you call the IRS they use a text-to-speech system to generate the voice for their call tree IVR. The problem is, it's a commercially available system that fake call center scammers also use, so they sound identical. It also doesn't help that it sounds fake and scammy, so you can't use that as a signal to avoid the number you're calling, either

by mixdup

8/4/2026 at 10:16:07 PM

With calls, it's easier: if you get an incoming call with someone is asking you for money, you hang up and call back using the number for that organization that you've found yourself from official sources. Never trust incoming calls when it comes to money.

by grishka

8/4/2026 at 10:51:00 PM

So I call back and get dropped at the top of the phone tree. Now how do I address the original problem?

by smallerize

8/4/2026 at 10:26:50 PM

I know that, does my grandmother? In the heat of the moment, will she remember that I told her 2 years ago when they call her?

by mixdup

8/4/2026 at 10:38:08 PM

We've desperately needed secure identity verification for business callers for years, so we can start the decades long process of changing people's instincts about it.

There's no good reason any business should be able to contact me without whoever is calling cryptographically proving they're that business and my phone showing the name and logo from a copy or mirror of an official database.

It should just be a standard part of business registration processes.

by XorNot

8/4/2026 at 10:59:03 PM

With calls, drop any non-prearranged calls, period.

Over a few years I burned that approach into my parents. It was tough, but worth it.

by lstodd

8/4/2026 at 10:14:13 PM

>Our Australian Communications and Media Authority body (ACMA) recently reported 336M blocked scam SMSs

Australia has mandatory identity verification for getting a SIM card.

The FCC is now proposing [1] to add a rule to require government ID, physical address, and alternative phone number for every phone line in the US.

KYC for phone lines would cause more IDs to be leaked, and more American dollars lost to scammers and fraudsters.

[1] https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-f...

Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462308

by Cider9986

8/4/2026 at 10:32:52 PM

The phishing in Australia came from uncontrolled SMS gateways which allowed for sender impersonation, not physical phones with SIM cards. They've recently partly closed the loophole by requiring providers to register sender names.

by ern

8/4/2026 at 10:35:11 PM

Alternative Phone Line? You want the bootstrapping problem?

by J-Kuhn

8/4/2026 at 11:25:55 PM

I spend a lot of time figuring out whether an email from facebookmail.com is legit

by charlieyu1

8/4/2026 at 9:54:26 PM

It reminds me how at work we had to take a course hosted on our domain about how to recognize phishing and a few days later we got an e-mail from outside our domain saying we had to take a course about a different subject on their domain. We got an email from management a week or so later that complained that so few people had completed the new training -- because we all assumed it was a phishing attempt because it was exactly the sort of thing the phishing course talked about!

by jhbadger

8/4/2026 at 11:26:28 PM

Our idiots decided to conduct phishing tests by allowing KnowB4 to send "official" phishing emails. The kind that Outlook/Exchange don't flag as "outside your organization." So now there's no real way to tell what could be a legitimate email from illegitimate.

Also, the Knowb4 phishing tests include some Knowb4 headers, so it's trivial to pass the test (though they're usually so stupidly obvious that you'd never need to check).

by LgWoodenBadger

8/4/2026 at 10:44:51 PM

I'm forced to have a relationship with a bank that sends out iPad giveaway emails, where your chance of winning is contingent on filling out a survey with personal information. These occasionally go out on the same day as their periodic "how to recognize scams" newsletter.

by AlotOfReading

8/4/2026 at 10:45:27 PM

A significant number of phishing attempts would be thwarted if email apps had the option to expand the links next to URLs on platforms without mouseover, like mobile.

by ern

8/4/2026 at 10:03:53 PM

We have a training thing at work that sends out phishing emails and you are supposed to report them using a handy button in the email app. If they are training emails you get a good job website that pops up. I greatly enjoy reporting every single genuine email that reads anything like a potential phishing email as there is someone in IT that reviews them and probably gets annoyed at the various groups sending sketchy emails for official business.

by starky

8/4/2026 at 9:37:45 PM

I remember receiving a genuine "verify your account" email from PayPal way back. The phishers didn't make it up, they were just copying actual emails PayPal sent their own users.

by chuckadams

8/4/2026 at 10:02:52 PM

If I had a nickel for every post I saw on HN front page involving companies confusing people on phishing-like patterns today, I would have two nickels. Which is not a lot but still weird that it happened twice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172834

by eventualcomp

8/4/2026 at 9:31:26 PM

Do they build their own software or contract it to the consultants?

by darth_avocado

8/4/2026 at 9:48:10 PM

This shit drives me insane. Last year I had my home insurer send me a link in an SMS pointing me to allstate.yem.bo to collect some information. Stop training your users to get phished!!

by agency

8/4/2026 at 10:22:25 PM

I wouldn’t assume that email is genuine. “Hi,” and “…the B-point link that I’ve sent”? Dodgy AF.

My first suspicion would be that they’re getting hold of the Fedex invoice data, via a software compromise or an insider.

If it really is real, then wow, FedEx Australia sounds like it’s one guy operating out of a shipping container down at the docks.

by antonvs

8/4/2026 at 10:08:45 PM

> Why are the "D" and the "T" capitalised? Dodgy AF!

You should be more respectful, you’ve clearly received a Message direct from President Trump!

by antonvs

8/4/2026 at 9:45:25 PM

[flagged]

by siftagent