Based on the number of emails I get because other people think my email address is their email address, I too can't understand how people can be so stupid.
This is the worst kind of spam. There is someone who enters my email for all his electronic receipts. I am not sure if he's purposefully enter a "fake" email or mistyping his own. But either way, it doesn't get classified as spam. There is also no way to "unsubscribe".
I now know the guy drives a Mitsubishi which he regularly services and also shops at Target and Kmart - mainly purchasing BBQ equipment.
speaking of using others' numbers, I use 867-5309* for the shopper-loyalty-card number at every retailer that asks for one (in exchange for discounts). I think that dozens of others must use this number as well, as the supermarket receipt sometimes shows totals of $10,000-20,000 per week for "my" account.
*For those born after the 1980s, the song "Jenny (867-5309)" was a hit for the band Tommy TuTone and received significant airplay. It was a catchy tune, and the phone number was the chorus. As such, it's an easy number to remember.
Gives me a self-organizing-system chuckle every time.
(Carpet/flooring company. The last four numbers are L-U-N-A, which they still use in a different number.)
I finally figured out the reason for one person who's been using my email address for all kinds of things for years: his is easy to mistake for mine when being given over the phone. We have the same gmail address except that mine is first.j.lastname@ and his is first.jay.lastname@.
So now everyone with that lastname uses this email address. I get party invitations, venmos, confidential hospital forms, tax returns, you name it.
Pretty impressive given that it launched in 2004.
> and used first.last@gmail.com. There was someone who signed up as firstlast@gmail.com
That's not possible. Gmail won't let you sign up for an already in use email and they strip the dots before they check.
The latest is Paypal who WON'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT! (sorry, needed to have a dig at Paypal's awful support there).
This person has tried to sign up for at least 6 things over the last year only to find that the registration confirmation emails never reach her.
It's nuts!
Some lawyer with an amazingly active life, and is learning to be a pilot, and other things I've forgotten has the same not too common name as me, and has firstname.lastnamee@gmail.com as his email address.
While at first cute, the number of times I've had to deal with other law firms who have sent me some incredibly sensitive document and then demanded I sign a document somehow proving I never read, nor will keep, the document they sent me by mistake is getting old.
Or my favorite, when a plane leasing company sent me some very large bill, and when I tried to explain the confusion, they claimed it was my responsibility to find the right person, or pay the bill.
People amaze me.
(And it's super petty of me, but this lawyer's family sends invites to family events to me now. The first few times I responded trying to fix the situation. Then I tried going radio silent to these, but they got more and more incessant on a response, so now I just respond that I'm not interested in attending.)
Edit: having sensitive information sent to a personal gmail account is also a problem in itself and is probably directly and unambiguously prohibited by the firm. You should really let them know
Tell them: no problem, but first you have to pay the fee and send them an invoice for some large but not completely crazy amount. :)
Just show up to the party?
But then get someone with your name that gets a support tech at your email host that's willing to reset the password for them, even worse bypassing any security they have, and then you're going to have a bad, bad day.
And with so many services potentially tied to your email address, this can amount to identity theft. Maybe the caller and the admin circumventing security for them should be getting some legal trouble for this.
What was most impressive was when I called Amazon to complain that someone opened an AWS account using my email addy fraudulently. They did several things to try to prove that I was the one lying (sent a confirmation email that I never clicked, sent a verification email which I was able to read back over the phone), and even confirmed from logs that the offending party bypassed the e-mail signup verification process by using a phone number rather than email address.
They made some vague promise that they would open an investigation and close it if they deemed it fraudulent. They never did. My guess is that they are siding with random-fraudster-with-Indian-IP because he's the one that will (potentially) pay them money.
All the company has is an email address and a bunch of other incorrect information.
Second time it happened, I somehow managed to get someone at Netflix to look into it. I haven't had the problem since.
Called the pizza place and it took them quite some time to understand what could have gone wrong. I had, after all, logged in, and was still logged in. We had a good laugh when we figured it out. Sales rep called the guy up, but I don't think he cancelled the pizza. So free pizza, I guess.
Back in the days of pheasant-under-glass mainframes, I had a part time student job as an operator in the computation center. We had a phone at the operator console, and 90% of the legitimate calls came from the operator console at the computation center at the other state university on the other side of the state. Our phone number happenned to be the same, but for the middle two digits reversed, of the most popular pizza place in a college town. The vast majority of the calls were to place a pizza order, not someone looking for the on-duty mainframe operator.
Our standard practice was to answer the phone “wrong number” — because it usually was. Anyone with a legit reason to call us knew the drill. Pizza orderers, especially the half-drunk ones, were our amusment on an lonely night shift of hanging tapes.
what do you mean by "think" ? I understand that mishaps can happen when numbers are canceled and moved to another person, but the old number is still registered in certain places, but why would someone want someone's else number ?
When my friend linked her CVS account to her mobile phone, CVS sells each interaction to various parties. There's a whole business where certain debt collectors will buy almost aged out debt for $0.01 on the dollar, "make contact with the debtor" and once that happens, they can resell the debt for $0.05 on the dollar.
All of the sudden she started getting messages that she won cars, etc. All attempting to establish contact.
Because companies buy and mix data from different sources, it's easy for companies to inject bad data, as they assume that certain types of data are highly reliable.
My real name is extremely common, and each time I've been assigned a new phone number, I get calls for months (sometimes years) from private investigators, collection agencies, etc., looking for someone else who shares my name.
Another possibility is that people deliberately used the number knowing that it was fake (or knowing that it belonged to someone else). Why? I can't imagine many reasons:
- distrust of this weird new Social Security program that was started just 3 years earlier, so they gave this fake number to avoid participating in this fraud or scam
- distrust of the federal government, esp. since the U.S. was still in The Great Depression and some people felt that Roosevelt was turning the U.S. into a socialist state, hence use of a fake number to avoid creating a socialist state
- people who had restarted their lives under a new identity (which was easy to do in an era where jobs paid cash and nobody needed real ID) -- to escape a spouse, the police, a criminal past -- would not want to get an SSN under their original name
- people living in the U.S. illegally were being asked by their employers for their SSNs, so they found this handy number to use
- people who were eligible for a genuine SSN but hadn't bothered to get one were being asked by their employers, so they gave the fake one
I also occasionally get for others, yesterday for example I got one for a guy in Lubbock notifying me he's off the wait list to be a Dash driver.
I get bank emails, airbnb confirmations, sports team info, paystubs, return to work from counseling info, airline confirmations, the Vermont guy's Wired credentials one time and tons of his photo assignments over the years, personal emails, someone's Apple account, ride sharing password resets...
Looking at the pictures, there is no name or picture on the fake card. The card looks exactly the same as a normal one. The only difference is the word 'specimen', which doesn't even cover the whole card and to me does not convey the meaning 'fake, don't use'.
1970s in USA were a drastically different time than today. Information warfare did not really exist in a meaningful sense for the common person in terms of threats that they would have to consider realistically. Information was even hard to come by for the average person in the country back then.
Even ignoring those facts, if you're comparing that to email addresses being known or used today, I think that is also a very uninformed view of the world. The vast majority of the country even today does not understand what information about them is considered confidential, and what is not. I personally see this even among engineers from what are considered top schools today.
This is not a matter of intelligence. It is a matter of being informed. I don't believe that anyone is inherently stupid for being misinformed, especially in an age where information is used for warfare.
In the last 5 years, I can recall situations where entering my email address led to:
- At least three instances where a multiple people abandoned a new job onboarding due to use of my email address. (In Scotland, Texas and Ireland)
- One instance where someone was leaking sensitive PII and video regarding a workplace incident that killed someone.
- Multiple dressing room / bedroom "how do i look" emails.
- One person sent an email every quarter with a zip file containing a VPN client and a word document with a list of about a dozen username, passwords, etc for the industrial facility that she was a plant safety manager.
- One guy test drives luxury cars in the Washington DC region as a hobby.
- An attorney sent a bunch of litigation related materials to his client. And a bunch of followups to get signatures as deadlines were missed.
- One guy was a big Ashley Madison user
- Lots of real estate agents in weird disjointed conversations.
This stuff has nothing to do with information warfare. Just simple mistakes compounded by complete inattention to detail and often combined with incredibly stupid or irresponsible behavior.
It's amazing how sloppy people can be with email addresses.
We can all laugh right up until we sign up for a site built by someone who doesn't know credit card companies offer test numbers or doesn't understand the value of hashing passwords.
Fun fact - if you sign up with an email address and password and then someone later uses Door Dash with the android authentication on their phone they can log in to the same account without needing credentials. That was a fun email to write to support.
> If your email address is [First initial]+[Last name]@gmail.com you gradually get to know lots of older people who have the same name pattern. [...] it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.
I've had a college professor give my email to all her students. I've had numerous job acceptance letters go to me. And so on so on.
Some of these I know well, and even reply "No, your professor's email is actually X. But actually you may want to correct number 3 before your send it to her..."
As one of the first subscribers to a new ISP, that was set to be the most popular one in my country, I was able to get an email address with my nick. I couldn't anticipate what was coming my way. It was possible to explain most people their mistakes, not the guy sending me underskirt porn. Except it was scottish underskirt porn. It was too embarrassing to write a complaint.
Now with my current gmail address I had a problem with a bunch of... individuals that use a reply-to-all mail list. Forced to mask everything as spam.
(For example, if my phone number in 1995 was 123-456-7890, then I provide the fake number 123-555-7890.)
I even get door PIN codes for various gyms, etc. Ugh.
As a Canadian, the number of Republican/right wing mailing lists I get signed up to is astounding.