Thankfully, after reaching out to him he finally removed my address from his profile, although he never responded to questions about how this might have happened. It’s probably a good thing I’m not massively into computer games, because the online gaming (and gambling) profiles tied to my old Gmail account are innumerable.įor several years until recently, I was receiving the monthly statements intended for an older gentleman in India who had the bright idea of using my Gmail account to manage his substantial retirement holdings. Someone did, and the results were often hilarious. The Weber emails I periodically receive remind me of a piece I wrote many years ago for The Washington Post, about companies sending email from without considering that someone might own that domain. If any of my Weber grill parts ever fail, I’m set for life on that front. If for some reason I ever needed to order pet food or medications online, my phantom accounts at Chewy, Coupaw and Petco have me covered. At last check, my account is listed as the backup for more than three dozen Yahoo, Microsoft and other Gmail accounts and their associated file-sharing services. Almost certainly, these users just lazily picked my account name at random when asked for a backup email - apparently without fully realizing the potential ramifications of doing so. I’m perpetually amazed by how many other Gmail users and people on similarly-sized webmail providers have opted to pick my account as a backup address if they should ever lose access to their inbox. I’ve lost count of the number of active bank, ISP and web hosting accounts I can tap into. This particular email address has accounts that I never asked for at H&R Block, Turbotax, TaxAct, iTunes, LastPass, Dashlane, MyPCBackup, and Credit Karma, to name just a few. That is to be expected, I suppose.īut what still blows me away is the number of financial and other sensitive accounts I could access if I were of a devious mind. Naturally, my account has been signed up involuntarily for nearly every dating and porn website there is. What is endlessly fascinating is how many people think it’s a good idea to sign up for important accounts online using my email address. Hence, the constant account takeover requests. These account names tend to be highly prized among certain communities, who busy themselves with trying to hack them for personal use or resale. Naming the address here would only invite more spam and account hijack attempts, but let’s just say the account name has something to do with computer hacking.īecause it’s a relatively short username, it is what’s known as an “ OG” or “ original gangster” account. But there is also a puzzling side to all this noise: Random people tend to use your account as if it were theirs, and often for some fairly sensitive services online.Ībout 16 years ago - back when you actually had to be invited by an existing Google Mail user in order to open a new Gmail account - I was able to get hold of a very short email address on the service that hadn’t yet been reserved. If your account name is short and desirable enough, this kind of activity can make the account less reliable for day-to-day communications because it tends to bury emails you do want to receive. When you own a short email address at a popular email provider, you are bound to get gobs of spam, and more than a few alerts about random people trying to seize control over the account.
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