Trump Mobile, a wireless prepaid carrier with loose ties to President Donald Trump, is investigating a possible security incident through which the company exposed the personal identification of some customers who pre-ordered its flagship phone months ago.
Customer names, email addresses, mailing addresses, mobile phone numbers and order identifiers were accessible online through a third-party platform that supports some Trump Mobile operations, according to a notice sent by the company last week.
Trump Mobile said it has not found evidence that its own systems, network or infrastructure were directly compromised, and it affirmed that sensitive personal information like credit cards and banking details were not posted online.
The issue was first raised by an anonymous researcher who attempted to alert Trump Mobile, then contacted YouTubers Stephen Findeisen, known as Coffeezilla, and Charles White Jr., known online as penguinz0. Both pre-ordered the phone for review purposes, and said their own customer information was among the names and other data exposed online.
The vulnerability was fixed after their videos drew attention to the issue, though the researcher warned others may have already replicated the exploit.
The incident comes as Trump Mobile begins shipping its T1 smartphone after a delay of nearly 10 months. The wireless venture initially promoted the device as a U.S.-built smartphone. Its website now says the phone is “designed with American values in mind.”
Tech reviewers noted the T1 smartphone appears to be a white-label version of a phone originally built by Taiwanese consumer electronics company HTC, though Trump Mobile has not confirmed this. The price of the phone is staggeringly high compared to the cost of a comparable HTC phone.
President Trump is not personally involved with Trump Mobile, which licenses the Trump name from a company run by his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr.
The security incident has also renewed scrutiny of Trump Mobile’s sales claims: Jonathan Soma, a programmer and professor at Columbia University, reviewed website code and estimated the available data reflected about 27,224 possible pre-orders. Soma said the figure likely included abandoned carts, meaning completed orders were probably lower.
That estimate is far below prior claims that Trump Mobile had received hundreds of thousands of deposits. Data reviewed by Findeisen and White suggested the company had around 10,000 unique customers and about 30,000 total orders.
Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien recently told USA Today the company was “incredibly pleased” with interest in the product but declined to say how many pre-orders had been placed.
