Customer Safety & Security

Masked email addresses

connectingdeals.com automatically masks the email addresses of buyers and sellers when replying through the site. This helps to protect you from receiving unwanted spam or fraudulent replies.

Masked emails won’t interfere with your ability to communicate on connectingdeals.com. You will still receive email replies and you can still reply to members from your own mailbox in the normal way.

How it works

When someone replies to an ad, instead of displaying that person’s actual email address, we simply replace it with a unique connectingdeals.com email address. We’ll also include a brief explanation so that the recipient understands why the email address has been masked. Here is an example of what our masked emails look like:

Buyer-n734wzfpd7z3b@reply.connectingdeals.com

How do I reply?

If you receive an email from connectingdeals.com with a masked email address, you can reply to the person from your Messages section or personal email mailbox as you normally would. This will show the “mail to” address as the masked connectingdeals.com email address. This email address is unique and will enable us to route your reply directly back to the person who emailed you.

Masking exceptions

When you reply to ads in the Jobs category or ads posted by business users, your email address will not be masked. You will also be able to see the business’ email. This is to allow businesses to properly qualify their clientele. Unmasked emails will only be sent to business users who have registered with our sales teams, and ads posted in Jobs. All other ads will have masked emails.

• For your safety, we recommend you only use the masked email address when replying to emails unless the ad has been posted by a business. If someone asks you to reply to a personal email address instead of their masked connectingdeals.com email, be cautious.
• Forwarding and cc’ing other email addresses in your replies may cause interruptions in service.

Safety & security policy

connectingdeals.com is your go-to online marketplace for buying and selling locally, offering a vast array of pre-owned items, from vintage clothes and antique furniture to electronics, cars and more. Your participation in our Vulnerability Disclosure Program helps ensure the security and reliability of our platform. Thank you for joining us in making connectingdeals.com a safe and trusted marketplace for everyone.

Disclosure policy

• We request that you inform us promptly upon discovering a potential security vulnerability.
• Our team will work quickly to resolve the issue. We ask for a reasonable time period to resolve the issue before it is disclosed to the public or any third party.
• We kindly request that you make a sincere effort to avoid violating privacy, damaging data, or disrupting our services in any way.

Reporting guidelines

• Please provide detailed reports with a clear textual description of the report along with steps to reproduce the vulnerability.
• You must include attachments such as screenshots or PoC code as necessary.
• Include a clear attack scenario. How will this affect us exactly?
• Submit one vulnerability per report, unless you need to chain vulnerabilities to provide impact.

Security issues we want to know about

• Parameter tampering — ways to manipulate user inputs or parameters that could compromise security.
• Injections via chatbot — vulnerabilities in our chatbot system that allow malicious code or data manipulation.
• Payment gateway design — weaknesses in the design or implementation of our payment gateway.

Exclusions

Reports falling into the categories listed below are considered out of scope for our VDP program and will not be eligible for rewards:

• Clickjacking on pages with no sensitive actions.
• CSV injection without demonstrating vulnerability.
• CSRF on unauthenticated forms or forms with no sensitive actions.
• Attacks requiring MITM or physical access to a user’s device.
• Any activity that could lead to the disruption of our service (DoS).
• Content spoofing and text injection issues without showing an attack vector.
• Rate limiting or brute-force issues on non-authentication endpoints.
• Service hardening recommendations without a clear security impact, including weak or missing CAPTCHA / rate limiting.
• Unrestricted file uploads without a clear impact beyond resource consumption.
• Self-XSS.
• Missing security headers.
• Missing HttpOnly or Secure flags on cookies.
• Weak password policies.
• Session management issues such as session timeout or session hijacking.
• Missing email best practices (invalid, incomplete or missing SPF / DKIM / DMARC records).
• Software version disclosure, banner identification, descriptive error messages or headers.
• Vulnerabilities only affecting users of outdated or unpatched browsers.
• Vulnerabilities on sites hosted by third parties, unless they lead to a vulnerability on the main website.
• Previously known vulnerable libraries without a working proof of concept.
• Public zero-day vulnerabilities that have had an official patch for less than one month.
• Tabnabbing.
• Open redirect, unless an additional security impact can be demonstrated.
• Issues that require unlikely user interaction.

Out-of-scope vulnerabilities for mobile

• Lack of certificate pinning or HSTS.
• Inadequate root prevention / detection in the APK.
• Lack of obfuscation or binary protection (anti-debugging) controls.
• Any exploit that requires tricking the user into installing a malicious app.
• Vulnerabilities requiring extensive user interaction.
• Exposure of non-sensitive data on the device.
• Storage of sensitive data in the in-app private directory.
• Discovery of hardcoded keys in mobile applications without a feasible attack scenario.
• Exploits using tools such as Frida.
• Any vulnerability that requires physical device access, root / jailbroken access or third-party app installation.
• Crashes due to malformed Intents sent to exported activities, services or broadcast receivers.
• Vulnerabilities reported in a modified APK through unofficial systems.

To report a security issue, contact us at info@connectingdeals.com.