Sincerest form of flattery, or worse?

July 1, 2008 10:39 AM

Somebody is joining social networking sites using my personal email address. Should I be concerned?

Last week I got an email from Friendster, and yesterday an email from Orkut (in Portuguese, even!) about the account I'd just created at their sites. Only problem: I hadn't created an account at their sites. Obviously I did not click on the confirmation link in the email, but still. This is my personal email address (not the one in my MeFi profile), which consists of my real first and last name at gmail.com. It got me wondering... is this an attempt at some form of online identity theft or fraud?

I emailed Friendster about it, and explained the situation, and the CSR who responded said he deleted the profile that was created, but he explained it away casually, like "oh somebody probably just made a typo entering their email address." I was already kind of skeptical (like somebody made a typo and spelled my first and last name exactly, by accident?), but with another confirmation email from a different site, now I think somebody is doing this on purpose.

I know it seems kind of silly, like what's the worst that could happen with somebody setting up a profile using my email address on some dumb social networking site? But at the same time, I don't want some future employer to do a search on my email address and turn up a profile I didn't make with information about me that may range from just incorrect to outright negative.

Is there anything I can do to try to figure out who's doing this, and should I? Or should I just keep up this approach of waiting for confirmation emails, then writing the customer service department of that site and asking them to delete the account?

posted by cobra_high_tigers to computers & internet (19 comments total)

An acquaintance of mine had this happen to her...it turned out that someone she hadn't been getting along with was going around the internet making malicious profiles under her name. Not saying this is what's happening to you (these girls were also 16), but you may want to run searches on your name and emails to do damage control, regardless.
posted by phunniemee at 10:46 AM on July 1

Is it at all possible that this is a friend doing the 21st century equivalent of signing you up for loads of junk mail? Actually I suppose the 21st century equivalent would still be to sign you up for loads of junk mail, but you catch my meaning. Could it be a friend with a somewhat underdeveloped sense of humor pranking you?
posted by mumkin at 10:47 AM on July 1

Is there anything I can do to try to figure out who's doing this, and should I?

You could ask the customer service rep if they can give you the IP the sign-up came from, which would most likely let you know if the perpetrator was local or not. Or if they don't want to give you the IP, they could do a lookup on it themselves... I would definitely try to determine if this is someone in your city/region -- in which case I would suspect pranking -- or someone far away overseas, in which case I would suspect less personal, more malicious motives.
posted by mumkin at 10:50 AM on July 1

Your level of concern should be commensurate with the uniqueness of your name. This has happened to me many times. I have the equivalent of [e-mail] and [e-mail]. Over the years, several other "John Smiths" have inadvertently used the addresses to sign up for various things. In one case, a "John Smith" from Texas was clearly putting the address on job applications; I was getting e-mails from Human Resources people all around Dallas about teaching positions she'd applied for.
posted by MaxVonCretin at 10:55 AM on July 1

The other thing that happens is that people want to sign up for something anonymously, so use a throwaway "johnsmithe@gmail" address. On preview, what Max says.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:55 AM on July 1

This happened to me with a myspace account and I thought about it and came to the conclusion that it was probably someone just using a random email address to avoid any spam in their real email account. I thought about emailing myspace asking for "my" password to change his myspace page to something extremely embarrassing but in the end never did anything.

It amounted to me getting an email once in a while saying that one of my friends was having a birthday or there was a new bulletin. I don't think anything nefarious could come out of it.
posted by premortem at 10:56 AM on July 1

Happens to me pretty often, I agree that it depends on how common your name is. My first name is common, and I have a nice firstnamelastinitial gmail name. Through it I've been introduced to people all over the country with my first name and last initial - in the latest case of mistaken e-mail, the other person legitimately thought gmail had given them my e-mail address the day before. Obviously, that's impossible but I didn't press the issue and just let them know I was currently using it.

Anyway, my point is this might be innocent. Someone out there might not be good with computers and think they have your e-mail. If that's the case they'll figure it out when they can't access their new accounts - which you should be sure to delete or at least not verify.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 11:14 AM on July 1

I had this happen to me a few weeks ago. I just clicked the "lost password" link and had the password sent to me, which I then changed to lock them out. Then I changed the profile to say "I AM LAME AND DO NOT KNOW WHAT AN EMAIL ADDRESS IS. IF YOU ARE MY FRIEND THEN YOU WILL HELP ME LEARN. KTHXBYE"
posted by rhizome at 11:47 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

I like rhizome's idea. If you have the account password (and control over the content in the account), then locking the person out will send them a message (don't use other people's email accounts!) and it gives you ways to cancel the account yourself, without making a phone call.
posted by meowzilla at 11:54 AM on July 1

like somebody made a typo and spelled my first and last name exactly, by accident?

I can´t get [e-mail], or firstnamelastname.com, because someone else already has these, spelled with my first name and last name exactly. I think their parents probably happened to give them my first name and last name exactly, by accident.

There´s no big database that keeps someone else from having your same first and last name. Probably one of these people heard that [e-mail] is a good email address to pick, and doesn´t know enough about this to understand what ¨email address to pick¨ means, specifically that you have to sign up for it and can´t use it if it´s already taken.

Someone is not joining these sites in your name, because no one is responding to the confirmation email. I don´t think you even need to call customer service on this, next time this person tries to log in they will probably just get a message to the effect that they haven´t replied to the confirmation email, and wonder why they can´t figure out this email thingy.
posted by yohko at 11:55 AM on July 1

I get the bounces and other inquiries about email mix-ups for a very large website and here's the thing that many people probably don't realize. A really large number of people don't actually seem to know what their email address is. It's not that they typo it (though that too happens a great deal), but we get many registrations from people literally seem to think that they know what their email address is, but don't. If someone out there with the same name as you thinks their email address is [e-mail] but it's actually [e-mail], that could be the reason.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:56 AM on July 1

I've had something similar happen several times--sometimes with registrations for professional organizations, once with information about the booking of someone's wedding reception, once with a volunteer firefighter's organization...

In every instance that I looked into, it was a typo or someone forgetting that their email address uses their middle initial. I suspect that you're probably seeing much the same thing and wouldn't worry too much about it.
posted by meghanmiller at 12:02 PM on July 1

....Hang on. You said your personal email is firstnamelastname@gmail?

That may be part of the problem. For whatever boneheaded reason, Gmail does not differentiate between someone who uses punctuation in their gmail addresses and someone who does not. My gmail address used to be firstname.lastname@gmail, with the period in between names -- but then I started getting all this email sent to me by people I didn't know, and finally figured out they were trying to reach someone who had the same first and last name as I did, but had her gmail address WITHOUT the period. Gmail treated them both as the same address -- we were both getting each other's email as well as our own. We both repeatedly tried to get Gmail to fix this, but they didn't, and the only way I could stop it was by giving up the Gmail account I had (I wasn't using it anyway).

My bet is that your Gmail is firstnamelastname@gmail, but the other person's is firstname.lastname@gmail, or firstname-lastname@gmail, or firstname_lastname@gmail, and gmail is treating them all the same. The right party is also getting these emails, but you are ALSO getting them, and are understandably baffled by them...

It's a big bug on Gmail, and one that they actually INTENDED to have happen, which blows me away.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:04 PM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Empress has it. Dots ignored by gmail. Seconded here. Unbelievable but true.
posted by sophist at 12:36 PM on July 1

EmpressC: I am not sure when you had that issue, but I am pretty sure it's not a problem in Gmail now (or for the last several years I have had my account). Mail goes to my Gmail account whether it's [e-mail] or [e-mail] - Gmail considers them functionally equivalent, ignoring the periods. Because of this, new users cannot (or at least are not supposed to be able to) sign up for an account that is functionally the same (i.e. sans dots) as an existing one, which ought to prevent the problem you had. Perhaps Google hadn't perfected the exclusion early on? Also, other potential confusing delimiters (hyphens and underscores) are not allowed in user names.

See https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10313#
posted by aught at 12:52 PM on July 1

Hey, don't knock Gmail! I love that feature. I normally use [e-mail], but on resumes I make it look more professional by putting [e-mail]. Obviously they reserve both of these for me -- they don't let someone else sign up and receive my email!

I don't see why it's so hard to imagine that someone just has a very similar name to the OP and thus has a very similar email address. For instance, maybe the OP is johnsmith@... and the other person is jonsmith@... Or there might be someone whose address is johnQsmith@... and he accidentally left out the middle initial. Or someone is johnsmith1 and left out the number. Or a trillion other variations. What's the big mystery?
posted by Jaltcoh at 1:02 PM on July 1

Someone is not joining these sites in your name, because no one is responding to the confirmation email. I don´t think you even need to call customer service on this, next time this person tries to log in they will probably just get a message to the effect that they haven´t replied to the confirmation email, and wonder why they can´t figure out this email thingy.

There are quite a few social networking sites, as well as other sites that require accounts to view content, that will set up your account without you ever replying to any kind of confirmation email, so this is almost certainly not the case.
posted by LionIndex at 1:14 PM on July 1

Hey, don't knock Gmail! I love that feature. I normally use [e-mail], but on resumes I make it look more professional by putting [e-mail]. Obviously they reserve both of these for me -- they don't let someone else sign up and receive my email!

This was just last year -- the other EmpressCallipygos and I must have signed up before they switched this over. Presumably they don't let someone else sign up with this name NOW, but they forgot to check whether they had duplicates before they turned this feature on.

So, yeah, it became a problem, because it's a nifty feature for new accounts -- but doesn't work so great for all the John Smiths who already had gmail addresses and were able to have one guy have John.Smith, another have John_smith, another have John-Smith, etc.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:30 PM on July 1

I have a not-too-common last name that I've almost never seen spelled the same way as mine, so I doubt it's a mark.jones type of common mistake. Still, it sounds like for the most part you guys don't think it could be too huge of a problem, so maybe I'll just stick with rhizome's advice.
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 1:55 PM on July 1