I Have Access to Bank Accounts That Are Not Mine (Capital One Bank) | Hacker News Reader

I Have Access to Bank Accounts That Are Not Mine (Capital One Bank)

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22 pointsblopeur10 comments

Looks like it was a case of mistaken identity. One party named the OP with power of attorney, mistakenly thinking of someone else with the same name. What bothers me is how that is possible, don’t you need SSN, address, signature, something more than a name to do that?

On a somewhat related note, my name is Aaron Aardvark, my email address is aaron.aardvark@gmail.com. I've been getting emails from some bank I am not a member of because an Aaron Bernoulli registered an account with my email address, and the physical address he listed is, as best as I can tell, some abandoned lot. I've just been autofiltering all the emails to spam because my one attempt to notify the bank about it got nowhere, and they don't provide an unsubscribe button. Do I have any other responsibility here?

It's likely a scammers account, I wouldn't worry about it. I have a short gmail address and a scammer was getting AT&T phones and not paying the bill. They gave them 5 in total I think. I exerted a bunch of effort trying to warn them, but it didn't help. I saw the bill get bigger while no payments were made until eventually silence.

Repeat variations of the above 4-5 times with similar outcomes.

You could dedicate weeks to trying to notify the relevant parties and you will get nowhere. Identity theft is so rampant in the USA I guess they just consider it a cost of doing business. It might even increase total costs to try and deal with each case individually at scale, I suppose.

I don't think it is very wise to post your email address in a public forum (here).

I agree, which is why that name and email are total fabrications on my part.

I was mostly trying to make the point that my email is my firstlast and Mr First Notevenremotelysimilarlast registered with it and I'm a little skeptical it was an honest mistake.

It would be better to use example.com in such tutorial example emails. You'll find that that host is set up for such usage, so it doesn't have to bother uninvolved people, like Google.

While I appreciate your point, I hope nobody is using my question as a tutorial for anything.

Some people consider that spammers have crawlers scanning the web for email addresses to add to their lists, since I guess that addresses shared publicly might be more likely to be active and respond to emails from unknown contacts. That's why it's common for people to describe their email address instead of writing it outright. You'll see stuff like "my username (at) example (dot) com" and other more creative obfuscations instead of just writing "foobar@example.com".

I think the email you've posted is someone real email as well.

I once had an unexpected deposit show up in one of my IRA brokerage accounts. Given the size of the amount, it must've been a transfer. Anyway, I called up the broker and they said they would figure it out, just don't touch the money. It took a good 3 or 4 months, but it was eventually reversed.

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