09-04-2025
Forbes Tips And Confidential Sources
Our investigative journalists rely on individuals with the courage to step forward when they become aware of serious wrongdoing. With the help of some of these sources, we have uncovered fraud in the tech sector, exposed unlawful surveillance, inspired legislative change, and held government actors and powerful business leaders to account. Because some sources risk reprisal, we may agree to protect their identity. When we do, that agreement is sacrosanct and we do everything in our power to keep them anonymous. Our goal is always to ensure that the public interest is served by investigating the tips provided to us, uncovering the truth and bringing it to light.
Forbes offers multiple ways to securely send information and materials to our journalists. Please keep in mind: no communication system is completely secure, but these options can help protect your confidentiality and anonymity. If you are using a third-party application or service, be sure to review its terms and instructions as well.
Please do not send feedback, corrections, story ideas, pitches or press releases through these channels. For general correspondence visit our contact page.
When sharing a tip, try to be as specific as possible in articulating a clear issue, event or problem that is newsworthy and of public interest and provide evidence and/or documentation to support that claim. We appreciate you taking the time to send us genuine tips and we will review messages on a regular basis, but cannot promise each will receive a response. Consider these tips from Freedom of the Press Foundation about sharing sensitive information with the press. When sending us a tip using any of the following online services, we encourage you to consider using a public internet connection outside of your home or workplace.
You may send us encrypted or unencrypted emails. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption protocol that allows you to send encrypted emails and attachments. If you use PGP encryption, here is our fingerprint and link to our public key. Please note: if you use our public key with a mail encryption plugin, for example Mailvelope or Enigmail, this encrypts the contents of your message but not the subject line or the name of the sender.
You may send us information and documents via the Postal Service. To protect your anonymity, we recommend that you use a public mailbox - not a post office - to drop off your materials.
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system that media organizations like Forbes use to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources. This encrypted submission system uses the Tor anonymity software to protect your identity, location and the information you send us. We do not ask for or require any identifiable information, nor do we track or log information surrounding our communication.
We strongly recommend that tips be sent using a public Wi-Fi network, and that you ensure the computer you use is free of malware. If the computer is compromised, communications using SecureDrop may be compromised as well. The steps linked to below outline best practices for use of SecureDrop, as well as the steps that we take to protect your privacy.
The SecureDrop servers are under the physical control of Forbes. The information you send us is stored on our servers in an encrypted format. Forbes reporters will only decrypt and read your submission on a computer that has never been, and never will be, connected to the Internet.
