FYI on scam shop masquerading as Emporia
Hey folks, public service announcement of sorts. I got a an SEO hit on duckduckgo for emporiaenergy [dot] shop when looking up some stuff. It seemed legit enough at a glance that I went through trying to buy a PowerSmart firmware upgrade on it. It was on sale and everything! During checkout it asked for an OTP for my card's bank and i thought that was weird... and incorrectly assumed it was an extra security step and carried on like a doofus.
Lo and behold, some minutes later I got an email from my bank saying my card had been successfully added to an Apple Pay wallet. I do not use Apple Pay. One DNS lookup later, and someone utilizing a webhost from Georgia (the country, not the US state) is behind the website. According to whois reverse search there are "8,547 other sites hosted on this server" ... good luck to us all.
I'm good to go with getting the Apple Pay removed and my bank is monitoring the card for weird activity now. Hopefully this post helps inform folks. I work in IT, I'm usually good at noticing this kind've thing... you just have to slip up once. Stay vigilant out there.