Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years
brusselstimes.com
brusselstimes.com
My Fiance has a fairly common name, and is the owner of the associated gmail account (think John.Smith@gmail.com). Several older women in other states have the same name...and seem to repeatedly beleive they have her email. My fiance got so frustrated with Walmart orders, amazon orders, bills, personal emails being sent to her that she tracked one lady down and called her.
The lady got angry that my fiance was 'using her email address and hacking her' and had to have it repeatedly explained that the old lady's email address was in fact slightly different (number at the end). It keeps happening. the lady writes it down wrong, her husband enters it wrong, her HOA (at her new house) enters it wrong. When the HOA got it wrong we told them and they asked us to fix it for them...We finally seemed to get some purchase on behavior change when we cancelled one of her orders via email. But the amount of information/influence we had over her accounts with just email was amazing. At one point, her husband used my fiance's email to register a bank account. We called the bank and after explaining the situation were able to CORRECT the email address for her (we decided that a bank account was serious enough to fix it rather than just be annoyed).
I think its perfectly valid to be concerned this is malicious or evil...but so many people are just inept technology users.
Just like biometrics aren't a password but are a good user ID, I have a couple different email address that I use for very different purposes that involve different exposure. My work email never has anything not work related, my personal email rarely gets ads and I prune it aggressively...my gmail looks like a syphilitic brain and I don't mind because I know what it is.
A fun thing I found this way: Samsung won't let you sign up for an account if the string "samsung" appears in your email address. Must be annoying for Big.Samsung.Fan@example.com!
I use a custom email for each service. Like xyz.amazon@my-generic-domain.com for Amazon, xyz.ycombinator@... and so on.
All email is forwarded to a single catch-all account from a good provider, so it is just as convenient to use.
But it is trivial to isolate what emails came from which service, who has leaked my email to spammers, to just block a individual recipient, ... . It also makes it easy to have multiple accounts without the annoyance of a fallback email.
I wish I had switched to this method much earlier.
Ideally that domain would be used by at least a few hundred people to prevent associating via domain name though, with different prefixes (see xyz above) for each user.
You can do it with the free account, too.
Just delete one if you are obviously getting spam because of a service selling their email lists. Which is a reality for "free" services. Bonus points because you can identify exactly who it is that is doing this and have the option of publicly shaming them.
My last name also happens to be shared with the name of a large multi-national manufacturer. For some bizarre reason I get semi-regular emails looking for support help from customers of theirs in Iran. No other countries, just Iran. I also get e-mails from people that work for the company in India with photos of their company picnic. This happens about every other year although it's possible I've missed a few. I don't really use the account anymore.
They at least seem to throw a nice company picnic.
Heh, someone else managed to attach their PayPal account to my email address, and there's no way for me to disavow or remove it.
Thankfully, I've never been able to recover their password because PayPal requires more user information that I don't know.
Unfortunately that also means that I'll never be able to create a PayPal account with that email address.
Its all sorts of email like OTP and statements and other stuff.
The email always comes from noreply@hdfcbank.net, so I haven't been able to report about it either.
When I moved countries, PayPal didn't let me change my country of residency, so now I have a user+[2 letter country code]@domain for the PayPal account in the new country. For IKEA it was a bit more silly because they seem to have several customer-facing systems, and 1 system worked fine but another didn't like this concept (I couldn't log in)...
Since then, other people have either come in contact with it or arrived at the same conclusion, and now I get e-mails for nickname@gmail.com-- in particular one individual-- I get business e-mails for him (he seems to be a graphic designer), he registered his Netflix account under my e-mail (which I promptly closed). For years I got his power bills electronically, as well as other spammy ephemera that's directed at him.
I am not being hacked. Nobody is using my CC information or accessing my e-mail. I cannot for the life of me figure out what chain of incompetency has lead to me repeatedly getting this individuals personal e-mails.
One is in Kansas City and mistakenly attached his power bill to my email. When I tried to notify them, they wanted to turn off the account entirely. I demanded they contact the person via the phone number on the account before making any changes.
The second recently purchased a house so I got all his closing docs. Even after notifying the real estate agent listed and the title company, I still got a few confirmations.
I've talked with the guy via e-mail and he is nice and all so I used to forward them to him but he's never gotten many of them fixed after I asked multiple times so I've stopped.
There is another guy with the same name as me with a similar gmail as mine and I've gotten pretty sensitive emails for him from lawyers, bill collectors, etc. I generally let the senders know in those cases but the rest I ignore.
So yeah, many times it's ineptitude.
I'm kind of surprised in this case, though, why so many restaurants send out food without a credit card or some other method to pay in advance. 9 years ago when it started most just took it on faith and sent food out but pretty much everyone requires pre-payment nowadays.
The number of places that let you register for an account without verifying the email address is huge.
I did that a year or so ago after I couldn't send the person a yard gnome for Christmas on the walmart account they set up using my e-mail. The billing notifications finally stopped on the one account I couldn't disable as they presumably paid off their industrial kitchen stove.
It was an interesting adventure tracking them down since I learned there are only three or four people in the (internet) world with my same first and last name...and a scary amount of information that can be found about people with just a little google-fu.
Maybe because this was all in Europe, when I said "you have the wrong email address," the agency actually replied that I was right, and I never heard from them again.
People have signed up for Skype and Instagram accounts with my email address.
I've gotten an email intended for my brother.
I get notifications from a pharmacy for a 60+ year old Dutch woman.
I got a hotel booking confirmation with enough information in it to manage the reservation. An ex-colleague works for the OTA who sent it, so I mentioned it and said they need to validate emails. He knew about the problem, and it's somewhere in their backlog.
Validate email addresses, people! There are hidden customer service and legal costs if you don't.
I wonder how many people think that if they're called "John Smith" that Google will a) just make the email for them and b) that they're the only John Smith around the town/state/country
And even if you validate, what'll most likely happen is that people will still type the wrong email then get angry the system didn't guess their correct email
sigh
At least my name is pretty rare, but I've occasionally gotten emails to some with the same first name (think company LDAP email completion)
I received private emails from all over the world. When I started I'd reply to each one to explain the situation, but it all became too much and now I just delete it or create filters to send it to junk.
I've also received Amazon gift cards on the US Father's day. I emailed Amazon every time saying it's a mistake and they should refund it, but they refuse to because the recipient isn't allowed to refuse the gift card only the orderer can change the order.
So from time to time I receive emails directed to him. I know he studied at Miami Dade college, did an exchange year in Venezuela, got a job as a waiter, then switched to multi-level marketing (I almost wanted to email him and suggest to reconsider his career choices). One time I got asked to register to a payroll service and enter my bank account information to receive ACH transfers.
By the way, it's spelled fiancee if that's a she.
And then it got worse. Several people coming of adult age started to use my address. First it started out as college papers and then it went to career searches. And now shopping and banking. I don't know who these people are so I can't forward them the emails. But I have gotten their international phone numbers.
In retrospect, I think I got very lucky in that. Makes spotting many sources of spam so much easier.
Similarly, having a phone number that is not a local one is amazing in cutting down bad calls.
I did finally lay waste to the problem when he decided that the prepaid Verizon phone he set up for his mistress needed to be associated with my account.
I'm very frequently forwarding these messages and saying "I've deleted this on my personal account", but they don't seem to stop - has been happening for years. Seems like something he would want fixed.
One time, I even responded to another lawyer to tell him and he thought I was the intended owner and started riffing with me over email!
https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-th....
And in my work, we always know the direction to null island, because stray robots will head right for it. I even thought about writing a short story about all the stray / bugged out robots piling up on the seafloor near it.
Or if you connecting from Europe https://archive.is/Kvgzm
This one is a better article imo https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...
Home Depot pickups, business invoices, Ticketmaster tickets, invitations to so many events, boat rides, cycling clubs...
One guy in New Zealand is a grip so I get a lot of filming schedules of movie locations/shoots and scripts.
I get Geico & Verizon bills and account updates for a guy called Judson (I'm Justin).
Another guy is a Teenager in Carolina so I get some dubious stuff for that one.
There were some others too but I auto filtered them to trash.
Receipts from purchases, I get signed up on email lists (why don't more require you to confirm your email?!?), and quite a few personal emails, such as invitations to birthday parties, etc. Every now and then I'll get something that is rather sensitive, like confidential legal or business documents.
I haven't had anyone angry at me, and most of the time I simply reply and tell the person that they have the wrong email address. I just really hate the lists I get signed up on.
I have tracked down a few people through Facebook because they bought a digital item that was delivered through email.
I was actually able to Google the combined information included in the emails over the past couple of years to pin down the guy’s home address. I did consider sending a postcard explaining the situation, but balked at the idea in the end, in case it came off more creepy than lighthearted.
I also once got a hotel confirmation which I initially suspected might have been an attempt at misusing a cloned credit card, but that turned out later to be a simple mistake.
Incidentally the only time I have had my card cloned was in the ‘states, because they seem allergic to chip-and-pin, which has been the de facto standard in the uk (and Europe) pretty much since the turn of the millennium, and in the age of today’s health concerns, the use of contactless payments has seen a massive rise in popularity.
This is multiple orders to multiple restaurants over a span of years. You are not going to have that many people all with a similar address and all making exactly the same mistake.
If you order pizza and it doesn't turn up then you are going to call again and ask where it is. At that point the mix up will be revealed and you will be more careful in future.
I am very surprised the police haven't investigated. If this is costing multiple restaurants hundreds of euros per order then it seems they would be quite insistent the police get involved. They would all have records of when those orders were received so I can't imagine it would be difficult to check call records to determine if the calls all came from the same number.
I’ve received bank account registration emails, Income Tax registration details, and someone has even registered an Indian government biometric ID (Aadhar) with my email. Even elevator servicing invoices (one of these people is an apartment super, apparently).
Clearly many of these systems have bothered with email validation.
Sending polite emails to these organisations mostly hasn’t worked. The only time it has worked has been, oddly, the elevator company, because I emailed someone at their privacy team in their world HQ in Finland.
Again, sorry if it bothered you.
Would love to read stories on those fraud cases.
Right now it's just left like an unresolved mystery, as if the gods are just causing this for their amusement. But clearly there's a reason why this is happening, and the reporter couldn't be troubled to find out why.
> “I have always refused the deliveries, so I have never paid for anything,” he said, adding that the harassment is not only annoying for him, but also for restaurants.
> “It costs them money and they have to throw the food away. On the day that ten deliveries showed up, I did the math: it cost €450,” Van Landeghem said.
I wonder if it’s this issue where the form gets the postal code but not the rest and they happen to live at “the default” for that location. This could explain their friend too.
Final Victory
Scientology - XS4ALL
0-4
https://www.religionnewsblog.com/13053/scientology-0-xs4all-...
I have also been lucky enough to be here due to marrying a Norwegian person, so I can readily get translations.
I don’t know why it’s not Albania or Andorra but makes sense it’s not Zambia.
But the probability they even take the time to listen to the old man story is pretty slim.
It's been happening for 9 years and yet none of these businesses have managed to put him on a blacklist?
I smell something fishy. The article started to read like The Onion at one point, and I suspect it's not even real.
This solves the problem you get when laundering money with a food joint: you need customers.
Maybe they noticed that those adresses never cause problems (single old people) and are close enough to not be too annoying to deliver to?
Maybe they are just too lazy to do more, and it's enough for it to work?
Maybe they are using a lot more addresses but we don't get that information? But there is a limit to the addresses you can use, and you are supposed to have repeated customers.
Maybe there is something special about those adresses we don't know about?
When you launder money, you loose some of it. It can't be helped. And criminal probably don't care about not being green.
Reason to give away pizzas would be to cutdown on marketing costs, since then you’re only filter for a “customer” is people that take random free stuff.
Similar but different setup is a fake lottery, where the winner was is preselected to win and the tickets are given away free to the public who have no chance of winning but provide there information. As long as the method of controlling the winner remains secret, it would be hard after the fact to prove the “randomly” selected winner was not random; clearly people do get caught and there are ways to detect people are doing this.
One last example would be a dry cleaning service, where they offer limited amount of to good to be true offers, then stock the rest of the clothes being “laundered” via cheap used clothes purchased at second hand stores.
A lot of these patterns show up in due diligence for business acquisition, especially mom & pop lines of business.
You can launder money with a business: you pay vendors and employees with the dirty money. But then your receipts are the clean money.
That means you need real customers giving you money. So you do need to run an actual business.
(There are other ways to launder money, usually that involve spreading it around between various accounts so it becomes hard to track. But those don't require anything as elaborate as actually hiring employees, just a fake storefront so you can get a merchant account and some paperwork done.)
So a business that is cash based claims $5 million in income from sales to customers. The business pays taxes on that $5 million. That $5 million in fact came from selling illegal drugs for cash. However, to the government the money is now clean as it originates from a legitimate source. The owner of the business can then send the profit to whatever place he wants with no worry. No real customers are needed.
edit: More specifically, a drug dealer cannot just deposit $5 million in cash into Wells Fargo without police intervention, a cash based business can.
If you actually sell illegal drugs as a business, but claim to have a pizza place on your tax returns, the government might inspect you someday. If they find that you don't have any big pizza ovens, routine large orders for ingredients, staff of delivery drivers, piles of receipts from customers, etc, then they'll probably get suspicious very fast.
If you do make and deliver at least some pizzas on a appropriate scale, then things get a lot harder. They'd have to run down all of your customers and ask them if they ordered and received pizza, check if the dough order receipts are real and match the expected volume, are the delivery drivers real and how much work do they do, etc. Much more work to run down, and who has time for that? You could probably get away with it, for a while at least, as long as you didn't screw something else up.
As long as there exist services that'll let you deliver something to someone by filling out a form online, with an option to request payment upon delivery, this kind of thing will always be possible.
Doing it for years does seem pretty crazy, though. If it is harassment, the harasser may be mentally ill.
Hell, I think half the reason this particular form of harassment is popular is because the target is often rendered unable to order pizza themselves, after getting blacklisted by every pizza shop in town.
If the harasser is smart, they'd vary the restaurants and use a burst of different ones at a time in sequence, with long time gaps per restaurant.
And if the delivery driver isn't reporting it to the restaurants every time, the delivery person doesn't necessarily have a high chance of reporting it, so I see how it could continue for a while if there are a lot of restaurants in his delivery range. (Assuming it really is harassment, that is.)
That said unless all these places (it appears to not just be 1) have the same backend and the tests are run against each location I'm not sure if CI/CD is the right answer.
It gave me a laugh for sure and reminded me the terror around kicking off a job in our production clone (the only way to fully test some queries/processes due to size and real-world data needed). We had scripts that wiped things like phone numbers, emails, SSN, etc before it hit the clone but not all developers where diligent about adding to the cleaning script when adding new fields to the DB. My nightmare was sending out a batch of SMS/Emails to people alerting them to an issue (the staleness of the data would fire off false alarms) that didn't exist.
(That comes from an assumption that pizzas are not paid for in advance, which the article kinda implies)
- they don't handle ordering and delivery: those are outsourced, and so they don't get the address. Or they do manage ordering, but not delivery, and the ordering system has a bug.
- they benefit from those fake sales because they are laundering money through their restaurant
- they benefit from those fake sales because they have an insurance that pays for those
- they are using those addresses, that they know don't cause problems, to test something.
- they use the pizza delivery as an excuse to be here, and do something illegal (surveillance, delivering drugs, territorial presence, etc).
- it's a fake/exagerated article/testimony
But the testing may have nothing to do with the pizza business itself.
Maybe it's a way to do hiring.
Maybe they test delivery gears.
Maybe they test the time it takes to delivery using said vehicule on one terrain.
Maybe they test the time it takes for some kind of product to be cold, or not tasteful anymore.
A serious test must be down for a long time, accross terrains and seasons.
And if you test a lot of thing, you will need a lot of deliveries for a long time.
They had to run a book of initial 'customers' in order to capture the interesting trade.
Eventually it was outed with fatal results, but until then it had turned up a lot of intelligence.
However, the fact that he seems to know a second person affected by this makes it way more likely that this is in fact a personal attack.
Either this problem is extremely common in Belgium, or this is a very suspicious coincidence.
eg. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-su...
Yeah, I'd have some questions for whichever of them knows when it's going to be the kind of day they both get one...
I should have added /s. Sarcasm doesn't always translate well to text.
It doesn't say if the orders actually have his address on them or just show up.
Approximately a small scale version of this: https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...
Luckily it's just pizza and not an artillery attack. I guess that'll happen soon enough, military bomber dropping a bomb in a wrong location because the soldier "ordering" the bombardment from the ground didn't update his app to the latest version...
Something stinks about this
A person using this to harass someone will certainly not use their own money to do it.
Susequent orders don't require this anymore because they have the address on file.
Europe doesn't do the credit card thing to the same degree as in the US; cash purchases, especially for things like this, are much more the norm.
Its varied.
2019 transactions value
cash 32% 21%
pin (iDeal) 24% 44%
contactless (iDeal) 43% 33%
creditcard 0.6% 2%
ownership 2017 2018 2019
pocketcash 90% 88% 88%
debitcard w. contactless 73% 83% 86%
debitcard w. pin 33% 23% 18%
contactless debit smartphone 7% 9% 12%
app for p2p payments 17% 23% 31%
creditcard 43% 44% 44%
[0] https://www.dnb.nl/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht-en-archief/dnbulle... on April 20, 2020
What crime is being committed?
From the article:
“I only buy frozen pizzas from Colruyt or Aldi. I have never asked for them to be delivered to my house,”
10 years ago by his neighbours, in front of a witness. He got his jaw broken.
5 years ago by a random guy in the street, in front of a security camera that caught the dude car's plate. He got his nose broken.
In both cases, the police at best did nothing, at worst tried to activaly prevent action (loosing the case file, not registering it, not passing it around, or asking my friend to not go further).
So I'm expecting that for an old guy receiving pizzas, they have zero incentive to even think about it.
And franckly, this comments feels loaded with assumptions.
I've unfortunately known someone who had a psychic problem . If she thought you'd crossed her for anything howvere minor, she'd harass you for years. She always has a list of 20 or so victims.
She had a never-ending list of new friends, and was the most charming person possible to them. She'd get invited home to them, or found some excuse to come by. Then, when the new friend went to make e.g. some coffee, she'd borrow their phone/computer/wifi/... , commit a few minor crimes like the ones in the article, and by the time the coffee came she was back in the sofa and the new friend was none the wiser. It would take a few months before the friend catches on, at which she'd drop them like a stone and find some new friend to suck dry.
Police knows her very well. Every 2 year or so she voluntarily commits herself to a psychiatric institute, at which point the legal system backs off. After 2 weeks she leaves against docters advice and it all starts from 0.
https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-th...
The article doesn't say if the pizzas were ordered online or by phoning directly the shops.
At the begining, the bot would not have been able to call, but I assume now it's possible to make bots smart enough to handle pizza orders. It may even be a nice way to train one.
https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/this-farm-in-kansas-is-th...
And in my work, we always know the direction to null island, because stray robots will head right for it. I even thought about writing a short story about all the stray / bugged out robots piling up on the seafloor near it.
That would explain why it went on for years. The test data won't be updated quickly and no one would flag it because it is not supposed to be a real order.
After years of receiving emails and calls - I received an invitation to a “Back from the Hamptons Cocktail Party” hosted by a now US Ambassador.
With the RVSP, I let the host know I was the other guy (we both worked in TV at the time).
She insisted there was no mistake and the invite was for me.
Spent the evening partying up with Martha Stewart and many other celebs.
Or a slightly more likely he's a crazy old man who's got a few wrong orders. As you can tell by the fact his friend has as well.
Explains why no blacklist or why no police helping after 9 years.
There's no default value going on here. No one here ever wrote a web form or used a map? Try and understand the Appp map Las Vegas issue, don't just rote learn it.
And if he never orders pizza, can't he tell the pizza place to never deliver to his address? If that's already been done then a sign on the door would help a lot, no?
Luckily, before I needed to do anything or call PayPal, the payee realized her mistake and PayPal took the money out - they notified me. I can only imagine how freaked out the payee must have been.. ;)
That's rich, either she is in on it or they have common enemy.
It's basically like knocking on a door at random and asking the person who opens it to eat something you're giving them... Accepting sounds like playing Russian roulette.
If I move into a new place I actually disconnect the door bell. Friends call by phone if they come and I receive my mail by a mail service. Somebody ringing my door bell can't be a good thing.
I guess that's not a good thing, though.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Protect-Children/dp/...
Would have actually prevented the guys problem in the first place. Nobody knows where he lives...
I guess it could be a bug, in some common system that restaurants use to register adresses ?
But no, Nothing.
So again, why is this on HN? I am generally curious.
Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I think this qualifies as interesting new phenomenon.