Someone registered their phone subscription using my email
Hello, as the title says: someone registered their phone subscription using my email. It doesn't make sense as I (obviously) never permitted this stranger to use my email for their subscription.
I say stranger but I now know their first name, their last name, their billing address, and their phone number by now. It's crazy.
I would just like the emails to stop coming! I know I could just make a filter to forward everything from this domain to spam but is there a way to actually make the phone company to stop sending me things?
The emails are coming from a language that I don't know how to speak (so calling customer service is not an option here).
I tried using the "forget password" option but for some reason that's not arriving to me. Probably it's pinging their phone first to verify that it was them who initiated it.
The best customer service I can find is by WhatsApp but it's a robot that always asks the stranger to verify that it's them.
I can't help your problem but I know how you feel. There is a guy in the US who apparently thinks his email address is my email address. He signs up for every newsletter and loyalty program that he encounters, with my email address of course. He even gives it out to his family, who send personal emails to my address. I've tried sending a friendly reply, letting them know it's the wrong address, but it doesn't seem to help. I know where he shops, what he buys, and where he takes vacations. I've blocked and unsubscribed as much as I can but they keep on coming...
Yeah, I had the same problem. Ended up finding the dudes address and phone number. Texted him he needed to be more careful. No response. Cancelled his phone plan. That fixed it mostly. Still get some random stuff.
You might consider cancelling whatever services he's signing up to. At some point after polite requests fail, you need to make it inconvenient for him.
This is a good idea, thanks
That sounds too spooky, almost straight out of a dystopian novel or movie! At some point, you may want to just go and confront that person while he is buying/shopping/etc.
It sounds like the plot of a movie. In my version, it starts out strange and spooky, then it slowly builds. In the film's climax, it's revealed that OP is actually unknowingly living a double life. They have some form of dissociative identity/compartmentalized amnesia. They literally live two lives and go by two different names. Through some neural quirk, they share the same email address. They have two entirely separate families, and each personality experiences broad swathes of missing time. It turns out that the person they're sharing their email with...is them.
This is Fight Club meets Everybody Loves Raymond.
Bruh this is also some Memento shit
There's a guy in Ohio with my last name and basically the dude version of my first name and a middle name with the same first letter. I started getting really important emails for him (like he was trying to buy a house and I was getting info from his realtor and bank). Responding back that the emails were missent didn't stop it. It was bizarre because I'd had that 1stinitial2ndinitialLastname@blahblah.com address for over 10 years. Why would you have stuff like that sent to an email you weren't using frequently and absolutely sure of? I stopped getting his stuff after his family sent out an invite for a big reunion and I responded that I'd love to attend but wanted to know if someone could come pick me up in MD because I didn't have the gas money. They didn't respond but the e-vite became suddenly defunct.
Bahahah oh my goodness, just imagine the conversation in Ohio.
Most interesting thing to happen there for a while tbh. Source: am from Ohio
Now, this may sound harsh, but when you're trying to surround yourself with smart people, learn every day for fun all your life, and don't see why wouldn't you, it's very easy to fall prey to a kind of survivorship bias. After going through so many sieves in life that could have prevented this, you can simply forget just how thick the statistically average person is.
I used to work in banking and had a boss that explained to me that a lot of the customers who didn't grow up with email just treated it like a post address. To them, the post office can figure out where a letter goes even if the name is wrong or part of the address is missing, so why would it matter if the email address was wrong? Clearly the computer which is much smarter than the post office can figure it out!
At least, that was our working theory. We did eventually add a verification feature in our emails that at least made people sign and confirm they got the email. And for most of them, they did absolutely nothing with their email, just treated it like a necessary garbage bin that the youth made them get. Any banking needs, they just called in or visited a branch.
My guess is that this happens with elderly or otherwise very unplugged people who come across an online form that requires an email address be entered, and they either misremember and enter a slightly wrong address, or just don't recall at all and type in whatever because they don't care. As long as they get the service they signed up for and they don't have to deal with websites and administrative stuff, they don't give it any more thought.
We do our IRS if you do your HMRC.
Do you get a link for a video overview of the service appointment? Those are fun.
I have a tag called "weirdass spam" that I shove it into.
I have an 18 year old very simple gmail address and people do this to me once in a while (at least the e-mails are usually in english). There's nothing you can do about it because it's on the idiotic companies that let people register for their services without verifying people's e-mail addresses.
It's probably double hard when you have an 8 character account name.
I’m in a similar boat, having an early, simple gmail address. Some dude signed up for Rocket Money’s Mint-alike spending tracking service, so I get weekly snapshots of his spending. I wrote to Quicken about it and they basically just shrugged and linked me a page on how to block emails with Gmail.
I’m not too bothered since this address had been relegated to junk mail duty years ago, except Quicken doesn’t seem to care the tiniest bit that this guy’s financial data is leaking.
You seem to have contacted the wrong support line. You should have contacted the "raise a stink on hackernews and wait for an employee (or C-suite) to notice and forward it internally" support line!
Offtopic
Uh oh, early adopter fight time. When did you get your invitation/register for an account? I had mine by 5/5/05.
I don't know, but the oldest e-mail in my inbox is from August 2004! (I hadn't actually checked, so I guess that's more than 19 years old.)
I guess you win the Tildes Gmail account age competition!
I missed out by a month! September 2004 for me.
Nice, mine was from Dec 2004 and I felt lucky to get an invite at that point. I ended up with three, so I made regular account, a "professional" account and one for my GF/now-wife.
Nice. Do you work in the industry? How did people get their invites originally?
My oldest email was from 2005 September, sent to my then boyfriend (now husband) with a video .rar attachment.....I do vaguely recall that at the time we used MSN messenger and/or text / ICQ, so Gmail was only used as a sort of file transfer and web storage for larger files.
Original gmail was entirely word of mouth, I believe.
I was just a kid. My oldest e-mail is about manga scanlation. I'm pretty sure I just grabbed an invite from someone giving them away on IRC. Searching my IRC logs, I can't find specifically any conversation about receiving a gmail invite, but I see many instances of people advertising that they were offering them.
Scanlators were heavy users of early gmail because as you say we could use a service with lots of storage for e-mails with attachments - in our case that would have been pages of manga, or QC chapters, editor tests, etc.
I remember creating a 6 character long gmail but unfortunately I did not hold on to it; it's lost now (the password was lost a long time ago, since it was never my main account).
Here's the original Gmail invite text
I've been using Gmail and thought you might like to try it out. Here's
an invitation to create an account.
[Protected] has invited you to open a free Gmail account. The invitation
will expire in three weeks and can only be used to set up one account.
To accept this invitation and register for your account, visit
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-hexadeciml-hexadeciml-hexadeciml
Once you create your account, [Protected] will be notified with
your new @gmail.com address so you can stay in touch with Gmail!
If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail
service that offers:
"conversations"
messages
Gmail is still in an early stage of development. But If you set up an
account, you'll be able to keep it even after we make Gmail more
widely available. We might also ask for your comments and suggestions
periodically and we appreciate your help in making Gmail even better.
Thanks,
The Gmail Team
To learn more about Gmail before registering, visit:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/benefits.html
(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them
into the address bar of your browser).
Man, a whole gigabyte was huge wasn't it
I also remember sending myself invites haha. But a gb was so huge I never even dreamt of filling my primary up. Lost those accounts eons ago.
Thanks for the blast from the past
Very interesting! Did you invite anyone else back in the day?
Also August 2004, we're Gmail twins
I had a college lecturer whose gmail address was just his first name. It's not a common name except in Ireland AFAIK, but it still drew a chorus of "ooooooh"s when he told us. All he said in explanation was "I know a guy at gmail".
Wow, really early. I know it was announced on April Fools' Day 2004, but I'm curious when they actually opened it up. I know I requested an invite as soon as I saw that I could, but I'm sure it was possible sooner and I have no idea how long it took for me to get access!
According to my outbox I sent out invites to random people in October 2004. Think I got access a few months before that. It was definitely all the craze to get a Gmail invite in the early days.
Damn, 13-year-old me would have been overjoyed to get one of your invites!
where can one look up this information?
AFAIK, all you can do is find your oldest email.
You can check your POP/IMAP forwarding settings and it says there "forward all emails since..."
That's not accurate. My POP date is 2008 and my signup date is 2004.
Eh fair, the internet said it was a method. Odd tho, my pop date is 06. IDK my sign up date.
It's likely by the oldest email in your inbox. I am sure I have cleared out my inbox many times since creating my account.
I’ve never used Gmail for personal stuff but I’m still rocking an original 1997 Yahoo! Mail address.
Yeah I have an Ameritech email address from 97 or 98 that I used before Gmail. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to access these days but generally part of the Yahoo! ecosystem (Ameritech>SBC>Yahoo). Last time I was able to actually access it, it was all spam, and that was probably well over a decade ago.
I had something like this happen to me a long time ago. I think I was still a teenager. I started getting account emails for some kinda game website. Think it was pogo.com. They had even started a subscription. But then they started doing forgot password requests.
Getting a bit annoyed with this flood of emails, I used a forgot password request to gain access to the account. Then I looked at the billing and account details. I got a name and a phone number. And I called them.
Apparently, some kid had signed up to play some games and the mom agreed to pay for like a month or so for access. But the kid signed up with the wrong email. Because we have very similar emails; I think the only difference was that he had a number at the end of his email and I didn't. The mom wasn't the nicest about this whole thing. She wasn't mean, just kinda curt, but I think that's because the support people were giving her the runaround, so she was frustrated. But in the end, we all got it figured it out. Emails for the service stopped, and I assume the kid got access to his account to play games.
LOL! I'm not alone!
I've gotten emails like this for over a decade. I've seen video walkthrus of other people's cars being service. Some woman in the UK was looking at wedding reception venues. Another guy in Nigeria(!) set his airline account email to mine. I hope he had a good trip to Vancouver. Emails from some private school in Australia. Plus the mystery TextNow user.
I've gotten emails for a doppelganger living down in New Zealand, he/she bought a house, got a tree transplanted, got some furniture and arranged to test drive a Volkswagon. His/her name must be nearly identical to mine which is wild.
I’m pretty sure I’ve had my very OG Gmail address since 2004, but it might have been 2005.
Since around 2011, I’ve received steadfast notifications and reports two times a year about some chimney on a residential address in Denmark. It’s doing well. My attempts at contacting the sender (some Danish chimney sweeper) and a person about the misaddressation has not bore any fruits so far.
If you know their name, address, and phone number why not contact them directly to get it fixed?
If you've tried that and they wont listen (I know this probably isn't the kindest way to send a message) but Id spam the FUCK outta that "forget password" link if it pings their phone. Maybe that would send a message so when you try to talk to them, they take you seriously.
It's in a way different country, which speaks a different language. I don't think we can possibly talk to each other live on the phone.
I tried WhatsApp. They're not in it. Yet.
Someone also used my email address to sign up for a bank account. I contacted the bank to let them know and they told me they couldn’t help me via email, I’d have to call. My take: I’ve already done my due diligence by letting the bank know, I’m not going to spend any more of my time on the phone with them.
I tried to get into the account via password reset but needed to know the DOB of the account holder.
Unfortunately this person keeps using my address to sign up for newsletters and other junk. I tried emailing what I thought might be her actual email address, to no avail.
Trying to get into a bank account sounds like a baaad idea.
I have a very common firstname/lastname combination; so common that I shared it with someone at my previous job and had a kid with the same name across the street from me growing up (our dads also had matching names, which was weird). My gmail is first.middleinitial.last@gmail, so I get email for other people pretty regularly.
The one that is making me crazy, though, is that I get almost daily updates from Experian about someone else's credit score. "Your score has gone up, check out these ways to manage your finances responsibly" or "You missed a payment, here's how to handle it". Having the email address is not enough to log in and update things, so I don't have an easy way of fixing it. At some point I need to try calling but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It makes me a little concerned that these are the same people we're supposed to trust to reliably track our individual financial history.
All the stories in this thread are making me glad I have my own domains for email. I think that would drastically cut down on this sort of thing.
How does one get their own domain for email?
Simply register a domain (ex: oslypsis.com) at a domain registrar (godaddy, namecheap, enom). Host the new domain with a webhost (there are many to choose from and the registrars above will also provide the service). When signing up for hosting most if not all hosts also provide email. You will now be able to setup and email address using your domain (ex: joe@oslypsis.com).
Once, a camgirl used my email address to register for some site that handled subscriptions/registration. I started getting a few emails with the subscriber's financial details (name, phone, credit card info). I emailed the customer service for the site and their tepid response was basically "we'll ask her to change it".
Surprise, she didn't, and after I got another email (a bit later; it seemed like she wasn't doing huge business) I did the "executive carpet bomb" telling the high-ups that they were sending people's financial info to some rando and their customer service didn't think it was a big deal. And this site was in an EU country, so GDPR was a huge issue.
Executive response was an immediate "We will get this taken care of." and I never got another email.