How to check an email is legit, if reply is from a different section/person

ih8stress

Hi,

I've emailed the CEO of a company about a mobile phone complaint and received a reply from a different Department - which is understandable.
I haven't had to click on any links but need to submit my number and imei.

When googling the Department, person and address I can't find anything though which is making me over-cautious. The address seems to be rental offices but can't see the Company mentioned.

Hovering the mouse over the details tally. Is there anything else I can do or need to do to make sure it is legitimate before I proceed?

Thanks

forgotmyname

You expect a company to have every email address public?   Not unusual for a company to have different companies internally.

I worked at a company that had a separate company that bought the office supplies, sitting at the same desks and often doing
the same work, just assumed it was for tax purposes.

ih8stress

Hi @forgotmyname - thank you for your reply.

I was referring to the actual postal address, not the email address - sorry my post wasn't very clear.

I've decided to leave it as they also said that if I didn't reply by 11am today my query would be closed and they wouldn't respond to anything else later, which I found to be abit harsh and controlling.

Thank you anyway

DullGreyGuy

ih8stress said:

I've emailed the CEO of a company about a mobile phone complaint and received a reply from a different Department - which is understandable.
I haven't had to click on any links but need to submit my number and imei.

When googling the Department, person and address I can't find anything though which is making me over-cautious. The address seems to be rental offices but can't see the Company mentioned.

Hovering the mouse over the details tally. Is there anything else I can do or need to do to make sure it is legitimate before I proceed?

What is the persons job title? In most companies I've been with there is a small team that deals with complaints made to the board but ultimately they are still equivalent to a team leader in a call centre etc and so not really the sort of person that's going to be building their network on LinkedIn or such. In other cases it's gone to a "Head of" or "Director of" type person who you would think is more likely to have a presence online but still not all do. 

What are they asking for you to do? Send an email back to them or click a link and fill in an online form? If its the later make sure the URL makes sense... ideally it'd be https://www.thecompany.com/complaintform/ but a spammer is likely to use something like https://www.thecompanycomplaints.com/complaintform or https://www.thecompany.com.somethingelse.com/complaintform Unfortunately this can fall apart a little if they are using something like ZenDesk where the correct url would be something like https://thecompany.zendesk.com/complaintform but you are unlikely to know if that's genuine or not (other than how much Zendesk charge it'd more likely be a free alternative if it was fake).

Ultimately if you cannot get yourself comfortable forward the email, with the requested information, back to the CEO's email (given you are comfortable with that), explaining your security concerns and ask that they forward it to the case handler