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Comment by mulletbum | Hacker News Reader

Booking.com let someone create an account with my email address, register a room in Russia, then charge 20k a night for it. I called them the minute I saw it happening, they said they would take care of it. I still have the booking and the amount owed on the account (which I password reset and took control of).

So something is wrong with their system.

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That’s really frustrating but what’s the intended angle here by the fraudsters? It’s just an email address.

The email address isn't what's important, what is important is the payment details associated with the account.

If they created the account, how did they get your payment info?

I think you're misunderstanding. They used the OPs email address and their own payment info, aka a 'joe job', it looks as if the OP is the one defrauding customers, but actually it is - probably, that could be yet another level of misdirection - the owner of the bank account in Russia.

I don’t think I’m misunderstanding. Since when is an email address used as a legal form of identification? If anyone can use an email address to sign up, OP isn’t liable for that.

They’re best off reporting it and ignoring it. Unless, of course, they used OP’s payment details.

Is there anyway to block your email to be registered into a website?

email addresses are strings, if the website where the registration is being made makes no effort to validate the email address is controlled by the user session registering it, how do you suppose to block it from happening?

Not that I know of; it's rather frustrating when you're constantly receiving some other person's correspondence (in spite of reaching out to them and asking them to update it).

From airline tickets, to bank statements, to collection agencies, to McDonald's HR portal, to HomeDepot invoices. Plz make it stop...

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