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Someone signed up to Amazon with an email address of mine, and saved their credit card details. I couldn’t get any attention from Amazon, and just got generic
by red369 2y ago
Someone signed up to Amazon with an email address of mine, and saved their credit card details.
I couldn’t get any attention from Amazon, and just got generic responses telling me I could reset my password, etc. In the end, I signed up to Amazon prime, I think to test some reassurance they had given me - I wasn’t expecting it to work.
The email saying I had just accidentally made a purchase with someone else’s credit card got Amazon’s attention. I think they also gave me a telling off, which I thought was ridiculous.
Not long after, someone else signed up to Spotify with my email address too. I think it was a child/shared account or something. I spent a while trying to improve their music taste, but I think we both were suffering from the clash of algorithms because they cancelled it soon after.
I haven’t had any people reverse-hacking themselves for a while now.
- jayknight 2y agoI thought about doing something mildly nefarious with someone's PayPal account that they added my address to, but didn't want to chance legal problems. Instead I just logged into their account and removed my email address and logged out.
- red369 2y agoPayPal is certainly trickier. I felt more comfortable testing with buying Amazon Prime through an Amazon account, because it would be easy for them to refund. I assume I thought of trying to remove the email address! :) I sometimes forget they’re not necessarily the only identifiers, and some accounts let you use a mobile number instead. Probably there wasn’t a mobile on the profile. It would be nice if all accounts used a username, and allowed you to not have an email or phone if you tick a box saying “I don’t care if I get locked out of this account forever if I forget the password”.
- GreenWatermelon 2y agoEmail is probably important as a spam-prevention measure. Without the necessity of validating an email or a phone number, one can create am unlimited number of accounts. One can of course create any number of emails from server/domain they own, but that requires more skill.
- maxerickson 2y agoYou are probably technically violating the CFAA when you do this. Having your email address accidentally associated with the account isn't authorization.
- rendaw 2y agoAren't they the ones violating CFAA? They made an account for GP then accessed it without authorization.
- bluGill 2y agoPeople make mistakes.Just because someone made a mistake isn't permission to commit a crime against them.
- asciimov 2y agoAccidentally signing up once is a mistake. One person signing up for products, credit cards, unemployment, medical bills, television services, payday loans, mortgages, jobs with my email address over a 6 year period isn’t a mistake. This is some middle age dude in middle America.
- ffsm8 2y agoWhat gives you the confidence to say that it was a single individual and not just a common email name which lots of people accidentally used?
- alwa 2y agoI get regular emails intended for my doppelgänger, and have for many, many years. I know her entire family by proxy—we’ve effectively moved through the same stages of life together, in parallel, across the globe. For a while I used to respond to the more important-seeming messages, but it’s more mailing lists now. She and I are very far away physically—and it’s hard to say whether she knows about me at all, as I don’t mess up the email address in our collective name… Oddly enough I’m still not sure of her correct address, only those of her correspondents. And in some cases family members.