Continued. Again.
I know I mentioned the wonderful emails I get – not for me – once or twice before. For that very reason, it’s hardly surprising that I still get emails to me where people who think that they “own” my Gmail account that I’ve had since 2004.
Clearly, recent times have been boring.
For some years now, I receive Geek Squad emails about purchases and warranties that “I” have bought – but I simply cannot find any way at all on the Best Buy website to either log in as “me” and cancel the notifications or account.
Still, Hulu is far more interesting, it seems “I” registered a Hulu account and the forgot the password (it’s actually more likely that I changed the password for the account to block it, simply deleting the account would see the account recreated).
It seems after 4 attempts, “I” gave up. Bravo!
Two weeks later, “I” was bored and fancied watching some sport. Now why didn’t “I” get that account passcode in my email again?
And then there was PeacockTV. It seems my payment details don’t work any more – but since I locked that person out of “my” account, they cannot update it. Once again, deleting the account will lead to the account being created again, most likely.
And now Netflix. At least it seems that Netflix requires you to verify your account within 48 hours – anyway, my VPN to Jerusalem ended up with a password reset cycle and the person and all devices being logged out. Since it was prompting me to choose a subscription, it seems the user journey had been broken due to the lack of validation.
What seems clear to me is that these emails will continue and I shall receive notifications of new accounts and purchases.
It is also very clear to me that there are multiple people – especially in the US – who are CONVINCED that my Gmail account is theirs.
Read on…..
An alternative to HaveIBeenPwned.com is Google’s Dark Web Monitor. In my Gmail account, I added my email address and name to their Dark Web monitoring system and it resulted in, well, my email being in some breaches.
Most excellently, it seems the systemic abuse of my email address goes back years and I find several examples of the email address being in a dataset with the details of somebody else.
I even know they had a common password used on various sites starting with “gg”.
It’s a very nice and flexible service but please, sites, as soon as someone begins an onboarding journey, only allow it to go so far without a verification loop!!!
Lead Hunter was a leak that contained 69 million email addresses plus other personal details and was lifted off some Internet-facing storage in 2020.
As you can see on the right, it contained address and phone data too.
Thankfully not mine!!!
The 2019 PayDay Loan leak reported by Google is hard to attribute; there appears to have been a 2025 PayDay data leak with SSNs, phone numbers and addresses but attribution for this source in 2019 is hard to fine.
But I trust Google (to a point)…
I find it really embarrassing that the world now knows that I (sorry, “I”) applied for some short-term, high-cost loan in the time running up to 2019. Thankfully, they appear to have become heavily regulated in Indiana – unlike the use of my email address….
Lead Hunter was a leak that contained 69 million email addresses plus other personal details and was lifted off some Internet-facing storage in 2020.
As you can see on the right, it contained address and phone data too.
Thankfully not mine!!!
The 2019 PayDay Loan leak reported by Google is hard to attribute; there appears to have been a 2025 PayDay data leak with SSNs, phone numbers and addresses but attribution for this source in 2019 is hard to fine.
But I trust Google (to a point)…
I find it really embarrassing that the world now knows that I (sorry, “I”) applied for some short-term, high-cost loan in the time running up to 2019. Thankfully, they appear to have become heavily regulated in Indiana – unlike the use of my email address….
