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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#101

Post by refurb »

zwayhowder wrote: post #8

For three years in a row I received an amazon gift card on father's day. Always intended for as far as I can tell the same person who has the same first initial and last name as me. I contacted Amazon about it the first time and they wouldn't cancel it or issue a refund because I was the recipient, not the purchaser. I worry that someone has been written out of their Dad's will because he thinks they have forgotten f…

I have lastname[initial]@gmail.com and it’s not a terribly common name, but I’ve gotten Interac payments (Canada) sent to me for little league practice (emailed back and they apologized).

Most recently I’ve been getting a cell phone bill for a South African person. It had their address so I looked it up on gMaps and it was a small home in a shantytown. I just received an email telling me the service was being cut off for non-payment. No email for me to reply to.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#102

Post by wyclif »

kstrauser wrote: post #87

Ugh, this is my life. Yes, including accusations of “hacking” when someone signed up for Facebook with my email. On the plus side, this personal experience made me very adamant about protecting mistakenly-registered users at my employer. When we were planning to add logged in accounts to our service, the sales team (understandably!) wanted the signup process to be as frictionless as possible, and thought that new use…

My main email address is @gmail.com. My surname is not a very common one, yet I still experience many of the side effects described here. I've had this account since the first day Gmail was available to the public, April 1st 2004—I was invited by a friend who worked for Google at the time.

Back then, I never considered this address an "OG" address, but then around 2012 I noticed something funny. I volunteered to do some charity work and everyone was asked to sign in to a log book and write down their email address with a pen. Several people who worked for this charity said to me "How did you get that email address?" and seemed to think it was unusual that I had a Gmail address that was simply my last name. When I asked them what their email address was, they'd say something like "fluffybunny32428@hotmail.com" or something like that. Hard to believe people use those kinds of addresses for official business and applying for jobs, but they do.

My name is also very English. So when I get missent email, almost everybody using my address is from the UK, Canada, Australia, or NZ.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#103

Post by matsemann »

Someone used my email to sign up for Instagram ~10 years ago or so. I never got a mail or any kind of verification, so I didn't know. Only found out when I tried to sign up myself a few years ago, and "the address is already in use". So I took forgot password, and got the email. I tried to get support to move the other account so I could create my own, but they never responded. Luckily the account linked to my mail had like 3 pictures and 5 followers, so not to big a loss when I deleted it and created my own.

I also got signed up for some kind of dating service I cannot remember the name of (before Tinder etc), and after being getting some weird messages in my inbox I felt I had to delete his profile. Sorry about the matches you lost.

Given the nickname he's been using on some sites when signing up, I managed to track down his real email some time ago. Basically mine + a number. Asked him to stop using my mail, and what services he wanted we should try to move to him before me closing them. All I got in reply was something along "why are you in my inbox".

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#105

Post by Baeocystin »

myself248 wrote: post #49
Baeocystin wrote: post #13

I was so happy when I was able to get my (exceedingly common) full name as my gmail address. 1.x decades later, I regret it. I get people's medical information, legal documentation, all of it. It is stunning to me the quantity of PII that flows into my inbox daily. Back when it was a trickle, I used to try and contact the people involved to let them know of the issue. It almost never worked out, and I got tired of ge…

I feel like you could simply stop using it, set up a vacation auto-responder, and log in once in a while to keep it from expiring and reverting to someone unseemly. This whole thread is the reason I started requiring extra email verification when members signed up at our hackerspace/makerspace. A surprising number of otherwise-bright people don't know their own email address.

Honestly, I'm not far from doing exactly that. It's just frustrating to be forced from one's own name by nothing more than legions of derppelgängers, you know?

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#106

Post by narag »

My email address is nothing too original (in the profile if you want to check) but it contains a dot. As you might know, gmail ignores dots in the addresses so nico.aragon and nicoaragon are basically the same.

Well it seems that Paypal decided recently that why bother confirming email addresses. Just let anyone use any email address. They send a confirmation email, yes. But then accept the address no matter if they receive the answer or not.

So I start getting notices of some not very bright namesake that is making tens of cents with some online store. The spanish paypal office is totally useless, they just suggested to contact Google.

I sent a mail message to the European Paypal delegate for data protection, but no answer and I still get more notifications later. It's quieter now, after another confirmation email (that I obviously didn't answer) but no idea if they did something or it's just that the account owner is not selling so much later.

Edit: years ago I got a "nico" account in a very popular local provider, so I had experienced the og problem before. Some other namesake is gay (maybe he's the pornstar that I see in Google) and received some explicit pictures.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#107

Post by numlock86 »

You don't even need an 'OG' email account. I remember a while ago I was making a weird claim to someone: "Hey, bet I can get access to a random online dating account within 5 minutes?" Well, sure enough it wasn't the first time. The process is simple: Go to any dating platform, register with a throwaway email, check the email body and switch over to your favorite search engine. Now search for throwaway email providers (domains, names etc.) with web UIs (that require no login but only require knowing the address) in conjunction with keywords and phrases from the email body. Yes, some search engines actually index these. Once found, copy the inbox' email address and do the "forgot password" process and you are almost done obviously ... Surprisingly enough, this also works for PayPal and the like and not just for dating platforms.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#108

Post by [deleted] »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #67
madprops wrote: post #17

Tip: Don't use generic names like johnsmith@whatever. It might be your name but a lot of John Smiths are going to use that account on a variety of services they use, for some reason. If you do that prepare to receive a bunch of registration and password reset emails. I even got linked with some guy in another country who did a very expensive Uber ride, which was kindof scary.

If someone signs up for Uber with your Gmail address, you can log into their account without changing their password using Google login. This is a very old Uber vulnerability that I know at least a few people have taken advantage of.

[deleted]

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#109

Post by smillbag »

1of1 wrote: post #92

I was recently in an Xbox party with 3 char anime/Japanese theme tags. I asked them why there weren't any numbers after their tags and they went on for two hours teaching me about OG tags and that his $750 tag was a steal as it wasn't just random letters, but an actual word. The other guy paid $1,500 and at one time paid $12,000! They explained you can buy them on IG or a site called ogusers, but that you should alwa…

Reply all did a great episode which went into these OG markets. One of their best: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/v4he6k

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#110

Post by BrandonM »

theshadowknows wrote: post #26
Baeocystin wrote: post #13

I was so happy when I was able to get my (exceedingly common) full name as my gmail address. 1.x decades later, I regret it. I get people's medical information, legal documentation, all of it. It is stunning to me the quantity of PII that flows into my inbox daily. Back when it was a trickle, I used to try and contact the people involved to let them know of the issue. It almost never worked out, and I got tired of ge…

I share a name with a famous person and my first and last name are also my email address (@ a certain mail service) and I often get receipts for things he’s purchased as well as personal correspondence. When it’s a person I always respond and say that unfortunately I’m not the person they’re looking for just so they know.

That sounds like something a famous person would say!
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