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| ▲ | delecti 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Have you tried sending them emails asking/telling them to stop? | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m a different person, but this happens to me, too. I have the kstrauser@yahoo.com email address because I signed up for it like 25 years ago. I log in every 6 months to see what the few other kstrausers in the world have signed me up for. Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff. I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it. | | |
| ▲ | josephg an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah I have josephg@gmail. The amount of spam that account gets is wild - about 50-100 emails hit the inbox per day. I got soft-locked out of google docs a few months ago because my google account's 25gb quota was exhausted. Some of the emails are really unfortunate stuff. "Your account was added as a backup address." - Then inevitably, a few weeks later, dozens of password reset emails. Sorry bud. I've received pay stubs. Orders and invoices. I get phone bills every month for someone in India. Its chaos. Early on I'd sometimes reply to these random emails telling people they've got the wrong address. The most astonishing reply I ever got was from HSBC bank telling me I needed to come into the branch to change my email address. Over the course of a week, I explained about 3 times that that was impossible. That I live in Australia. That I'm not their customer, and its not my account. Eventually they told me they were disabling online banking on my account. Now I've given up replying at all. Send emails into that pit of PII misery if you want. I don't read them. | |
| ▲ | Izkata 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I had one that person seemed to think their @twitter name was the same thing as my gmail address. Haven't seen it in a while, maybe they figured it out after I told their kid's teacher they had the wrong person... |
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| ▲ | lawrencejgd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >You write an email that says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?" >You send it to johnsmith@gmail.com >You receive a new message, it says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?" >You're johnsmith@gmail.com, you only know that's the address that's being used PD: I know that if he resets the password he can get the other address, but this scenario was funny in my head. | |
| ▲ | Mordisquitos 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That may be what they're hoping for, using a similar modus operandi as those WhatsApp/IM messages from strangers who text you with things in the vein of ‘Hey, it was great meeting you at the conference’ or ‘Did Martha like your flowers?’ etc. They may well be looking for targets. | |
| ▲ | tracker1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are times where you just can't... someone uses my email address in person at tractor supply co. and I'm getting a ton of marketing email I can't usnsub to. I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..." It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta. I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam. | | |
| ▲ | rationalist 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Contact the Bar Association for that lawyer's state. He will definitely stop making that mistake then. |
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| ▲ | nativeit 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You’re confessing to several actual felonies here, may want to change strategies. | | |
| ▲ | NikolaNovak 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right. Techies are always quick to suggest I do something naughty or funny with this "great power" I've unwittingly gained, but in reality it's just a liability. If I ignore it and they do something nasty and implicate me, it's a pain. If I touch it with a 10 ft pole, now I'm even more actively involved. Just include "not me!" In the verification email, dam it | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | “…and so I made him the owner of my account, and he used that to remove himself from it!” “We’ll be right over.” | | |
| ▲ | thatguy0900 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You forgot the part where he reset their email he didn't own and change their passwords so they couldn't get back into it | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think you’re misreading this. OP has an email account. Someone else signed up for some website that doesn’t verify that you own the address before allowing you to log in and use the service. If the site did verify it, the user wouldn’t have been able to log in because OP would have been getting the verification emails, and not the user. Later, after OP told the user and they failed to change their address, OP logged into the site and changed their password, putting an end to the spam they were receiving from the user’s actions. I don’t have an ethical qualm with this. He didn’t want to sign up for the service. Someone else signed his email address up for it. Legally, I can’t imagine that being prosecutable. | | |
| ▲ | NikolaNovak 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | One thing I've found, occasionally the hard way, is that helpful bystanders are always offering advice based on "ethical", "intuitive", "logical" and "common sense", usually without any aspect of "legal". I got divorced a decade ago, and every well-wishing person in my life was strongly urging me to do things which were shockingly counter-productive / dangerous / wrong, based on their confident understanding (assumption, really) of the law which was completely and dangerously inaccurate. Hacker News audience is global. People start accounts for various purposes. Yet people still freely share the notion that logging in to some unknown website run by an unknown company from a hard to spell country and then touching things is universally safe. I miss the old "IANAL" tag which at least provided basic warning and self-awareness :-). | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | While true, I think that's implicit in all online conversations. I'm certain my thinking is 100% wrong in some jurisdictions elsewhere. Anything I say is wrong somewhere. "It's OK: you can curse on the Internet." "Not when you're typing from Iran!" "Well, OK, if you're in Iran, don't take this American's advice for dealing with a government." Part of our obligation as a reader is to consider what others are saying in the context of our own circumstances and experiences before trying to apply it. If you don't, and things end badly, that's on you. But I stand on my words: I think it's ethically OK. You may not. That's alright. We're not required to have the same ethics or morals. And I don't think that's prosecutable. That's my opinion, based on my circumstances, not a statement of fact that applies in all jurisdictions around the world. Above all else, I got tired of giving disclaimers about every single thing I say lest someone jump in with a "gotcha! scenario" I hadn't considered because it's not relevant to the context of the discussion. | |
| ▲ | altairprime 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IANYL, though! Offering legal advice with the disclaimer “I am not a lawyer” could be prosecuted as practicing law if a reasonably party could still infer a potential lawyer-client relationship from your message and/or intent. Instead, “I am not your lawyer” explicitly denies the lawyer-client relationship, which closes the door on both being accused of practicing law illegally and on being found as party to a lawyer-client relationship whether or not you have the appropriate certifications. | | |
| ▲ | technothrasher an hour ago | parent [-] | | > closes the door on [...] being accused of practicing law illegally Does it? So I can say, "I'm not your lawyer, but I'm happy to go ahead and give you specific legal advice on your case." and I can't be accused of illegally practicing law? I was under the impression that this could still get you into hot water. But not being your lawyer, due to the fact that I am not a lawyer at all, I don't know if it is true or not. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt, but: As with all things, who are you going to get in trouble with? And what's so magical about legal practice as opposed to, say, giving shitty medical advice or telling someone how to build porch? Asking genuinely. No one falls all over themselves to say "I am not a doctor, but...", even though their next words could kill someone. The implication is that they don't have formal training but they saw something on Facebook that you should try. What happens next is on you, not on them. |
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| ▲ | tracker1 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You give someone ownership of something and they used that ownership... | | |
| ▲ | krickelkrackel 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's like leaving your bike in the street, with no lock. Still theft, but you'd be up for a part of the responsibility. | | |
| ▲ | tracker1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, it's like giving someone a set of keys to your car, and they take it for a drive. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it’s more like you registered the car in their name. Now they’re allowed to use it, and also responsible for the thing which they didn’t want. Consider that the “imposter” starts uploading child porn or something, and it’s on an account registered to your address. I think it’s perfectly A-OK to tell the service that it’s not me using the thing and I want them to close the account someone created in my name. |
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| ▲ | c22 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's more like leaving your bike in someone else's garage. |
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| ▲ | ntoskrnl_exe 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm curious if this would really be considered unlawful access, since only pure idiocy and no hacking/scamming/etc were involved. | | |
| ▲ | volkercraig 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It would be in Canada, but our "misuse of computer" charge is overly broad and never been well tested. | | |
| ▲ | charlieyu1 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | On the other hand, in Hong Kong it would be straight to jail. Someone was sent a link by the airlines, he changed a couple of characters and it ended up showing another person’s data. The guy voluntarily reported the vulnerability and all he got was a criminal charge and found guilty |
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| ▲ | jama211 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No harm done no one is gonna prosecute this | |
| ▲ | cft 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In what jurisdiction? He's in Russia |
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