THE SHORT OF IT

It is safe to browse and shop our site. Emails from us are safe to open and click. However, preorder invoices and other emails currently may not be reaching you.

Please read on for instructions on how to keep receiving emails from us.

WHAT HAPPENED

On January 19th, 2023, several of our customers notified us that their internet security programs (McAfee, Avast, Norton, Verizon, Microsoft Defender, etc.) warned them not to click emails from us or visit our website. Several customers also reported they suddenly were no longer receiving any emails from us. We promptly had a professional web security expert review our site and remove the issues that triggered this warning. Please be advised that there are no known breaches of our customer information, the safety of which we take very seriously, and our website is safe for you to browse and shop.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF

1) Your email provider may be preventing you from receiving ANY of our emails, including order confirmations and updates, preorder invoices, advertising emails, and personal replies from our customer service department. This means you may be missing out on your preorders, tracking information, weekly new arrivals, promotions, discounts, and more.

2) Due to delays in internet security databases correcting their information about websites, for some period going forward you may still receive erroneous warnings that our site is not safe.

ACTIONS WE RECOMMEND

• If you are not receiving emails from us, we strongly recommend that you:

1) Add ask@factorydirecthobbies.com to your email address book, whitelist, or contact list, depending on how your email provider refers to it. This step is very important, as it lets your email provider know that it should not "return to sender" when it encounters Factory Direct Hobbies emails addressed to you.

2) If emails from Factory Direct Hobbies are in your spam box, please mark them as "NOT SPAM" so that your email provider knows not to send them to spam next time.

• If your security program is still warning you that our site may not be safe:

We recommend that you "whitelist" our website (www.factorydirecthobbies.com) in your security program's settings or preferences. Each security program is different; if this option is not available to you, we recommend contacting the security program's customer service department for assistance marking our website as safe for you to visit.

If you are waiting on preorder products to arrive:

Your invoices may not be reaching you. Please login to your factorydirecthobbies.com account and visit your "My Orders" page. If you have preorder items that are ready to ship to you, they will be listed under the heading "Open Invoices."

THANK YOU

We're sorry for the inconvenience caused by these hiccups, and we appreciate your patience while the email providers and internet security programs continue to update their information to reflect the safety of our website and email content.

We thank all of our wonderful customers for continuing to support our small family-owned business. Happy Railroading!