Why is someone signing me up for loads of job websites?

October 4, 2016 10:37 AM

Several times over the last month my email has been used to sign up for many accounts on job sites like Monster, CareerBuilder and Dice Advisor. They use variants of my gmail address (e.g. [e-mail], [e-mail]) to sign up about 20 times, and since the sites don't have email verification, I get bombarded by recruiter emails. Why? And what can I do about it?

The accounts are all set up with Indian names, and I now get about 100 emails per day from recruiters for random IT jobs. It's basically made my email account unusable.

I've asked Monster to add email verification but they won't. Every time I shut down the accounts they spring back up again.

Gmail doesn't let me filter all emails containing the plus symbol, so I can't remove all the recruiter messages. What can I do to save my inbox?

I understand that this is likely some sort of bot, but what would someone gain by doing this?

posted by krunk to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Gmail's address aliases are a pain when other people don't understand them. Someone's just signed up an Apple ID that happens to be an alias of my recovery e-mail address, so I'm getting lots of Apple related stuff that just isn't for me right now.

Not much you can do about this.
posted by scruss at 11:55 AM on October 4, 2016

Response by poster: Yeah, I tried explaining how address aliases work to the Monster support rep, but he never seemed to grasp it.
posted by krunk at 12:35 PM on October 4, 2016

Gmail doesn't let me filter all emails containing the plus symbol

Have they changed their filters to no longer allow filtering on the plus symbol? Historically it has been possible. You might try this one which tries to filter all plus sign based e-mail addresses.
posted by Candleman at 1:13 PM on October 4, 2016

Response by poster: @candleman: yeah, you can have it apply specific labels for each '+' suffix, but I literally want to filter all emails sent to [e-mail] and send them to the trash. Gmail doesn't support regular expressions for email filtering, alas.
posted by krunk at 6:25 PM on October 4, 2016

Can you try filtering by other criteria such as subject line, "from" address, etc.?
posted by Leontine at 9:17 PM on October 4, 2016

I'd guess that the bot is clicking through to Monster from ads on a dummy website that the bot creator owns, and Monster pays them for each click or signup generated. Or something along those lines; lots of ways to make money from fraud in online advertising.
posted by smilingshadow at 1:45 PM on October 5, 2016

Response by poster: I can filter on "from" for the emails from Monster, Career Builder, etc, but the big problem is all the recruiter emails. They don't come from a centralized source, so I can't block them.
posted by krunk at 7:26 AM on October 6, 2016

Two more suggestions - you could set up an IMAP client that can do regex filtering and have it run periodically to clean up your inbox. A pain, but better than doing it by hand.

Also a pain, but you could set up a filter to use as your "real" inbox, and move only e-mails addressed to [e-mail] into it.
posted by Candleman at 5:06 PM on October 6, 2016