Tip: a real Staples or Dell order email can still be a scam. Flag phone numbers in shipping fields, and scan inside bounce messages
Talos saw about 1,400 messages where attackers placed fake orders so that genuine Staples and Dell order notifications, passing DKIM and DMARC, carried a "Helpline" phone number in the ship-to or bill-to fields. It has tracked this trick across more than 25 legitimate platforms, along with lures hidden in sign-up "name" fields and in bounce messages.
- Mail gateway: flag transactional mail where phone numbers, "helpline" or "cancel" wording appear in address or name fields, and run full phishing/URL checks on content nested inside bounce reports (DSN/NDR).
- Users: never call a number printed in an unexpected order email; check the order in the retailer's own account or app.
- If you send transactional mail: treat every user-supplied field rendered into a template as untrusted, and reject URLs, phone numbers and line breaks where they don't belong.