Comment by gregd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregd | Hacker News Reader

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My wife owns an email address in Gmail and you wouldn't think it was a very popular email address. Until of course someone's account information at numerous shopping sites began showing up. My wife contacted this person by phone and it turned out to be an elderly woman. The elderly woman was not having it and began arguing with my wife about whose email address it was. The elderly woman ranted on and on about HOW DARE MY WIFE TAKE HER EMAIL ADDRESS!?*@4@~!

She just didn't get it and more and more new accounts began showing up.

When that didn't work, I tracked down one of her relatives on Facebook, who happened to be younger so she got the whole Internet thing, and explained that her elderly grandmother (it turns out) was using an address that didn't belong to her. Her granddaughter told me she would talk to her grandma and tell her how silly she was being and promised to explain how her grandma could keep herself safe while shopping online.

No new accounts in the grandma's name have shown up since...

That couldn't have worked out better, and was a nice thing for you and your wife to have done.

I shared a story in another thread recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307375) about my relatively benign Gmail being misused, but I had forgotten about the really weird encounter I had a couple of years ago.

A woman texted me via iMessage that she was calling out sick to her job at a local public school. I replied that I hoped she felt better, but clearly had a wrong number.

She insisted that I was Joanna, an Occupational Therapist at this school. (Emma gave me this number!). Clearly I was not, and did not know Emma, or any of the other things that were going on. Then she accused me of stealing Joanna's phone number.

Turns out -- if you send an iMessage to someone in your Contacts, it does the first lookup by email, NOT by phone number. By assuming Joanna had my email address -- something lots of people seem to think is theirs -- I ended up also getting their iMessages.

I've had a similar experience quite recently. I started getting legit automated emails for someone named "John", some emails regarding an effort to buy a house, others from a doctor's office. Some of the emails looked rather important, such as doctor appointment details, so I engaged in some Internet sleuthing, and in a few days I found the person. They were an elderly gent who had the same Gmail handle as me, but his with a numeral suffix.

I tried emailing the gent to explain, but received no reply. So I've just been forwarding those emails to the fellow's real address when they arrive. Perhaps he never checks email, hence his lack of reply to my earlier note, but I forward just in case.

In the few cases I've had for this, social engineering seems the best route to fixing it.

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