Pople are fucking morons. I get that. But there’s a strange phenomenon that I am afflicted by on at least a weekly basis for many years now that leaves me shaking my head… that is: people (not just the same person!) sign up to all sorts of shit with MY email address. I really don’t get that.

And we’re not just talking about the sort of crap you’d give a throwaway email address to – we’re talking about the sort of stuff you give sensitive data to. I confess, I have fucked with one or two of them when it’s particularly annoyed me. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? These dumb fuckers are just begging to have their identities stolen. I wish I had underworld criminal contacts to sell their details to, frankly.

If you’re scratching your head at this point… think about it. If *I* am in control of ‘your’ email address, I can just hit ‘forgot password’ on whatever site or service you’ve signed up to, recover or change your password, and easily go through any verifications or security in place to do so, because I really DO have access to that email address. And then I can access all your personal shit. And do what I like with it. I’m not some evol hacker – I didn’t have to hack your data, because YOU gave it to me and pretty much invited me to use it as I see fit.

If I was an evol hacker, though, and given that the kind of asshole who would be this stupid probably uses the same password in multiple places – and even if you didn’t, you’re usually providing me PLENTY of info to have a good guess – I could probably take over your other email accounts, Twitter, Facebook and more. With a little detective work, some near indetectable ‘adjustments’ to your accounts (such as setting up forwards on your email or a second email account on your facebook) and a little patience I could pretty much steal your entire life.

I’ve owned this particular email address for getting on for a decade. It’s not like it’s a popular or obvious name that might pop into your head while faking an email address – it’s a bit of a ‘nonsense’ address, that only really means something to me because it’s a mashed up contraction of a contraction of my first and last names.

So I’m at a loss to explain why SO many different people manage to use my email address for some quite intimate stuff. This week, someone used it when they signed up to a job site, uploading their cv and filling in all their personal details, including street address, phone number etc. Like I said, just BEGGING to have their identity stolen…

Another signed up to ebay with it this week. I have EIGHT different ‘confirm your registration’ emails. They obviously reeeally wanted that ebay account. Now the thing is, I don’t mind so much if it’s something that DOES require a registration to be confirmed, because they’re stopped dead in their tracks when I don’t, but what really fucking pisses me off is when I manage to get subscribed to all kinds of shit I have no interest in. And then their unsubscribe links dont work. A lot of services that DO profess to require email verification fucking well sign you up anyway if you ignore them. I know first hand from the battles I’ve later had getting OFF of some services I’ve never signed up to.

You wouldn’t believe some of the shit I get sent daily because of the stuff OTHER people have signed me up to that didnt require a verification. If you ever want to fuck with someone and you know their email address… just sign them up to a few hundred newsletters.

One signed up to the Playstation Network with my email address, and Sony duly sent me a confirmation email with her billing info including street address and telephone number and the PSN account handle she’d chosen. They then sent me confirmations every time she put money in her PSN wallet from the credit card she’s added using MY address. When I explained to Sony what a risk it was that they’d happily signed her up without any kind of verification considering the intimate nature of the details they were supplying me regularly, and suggested they do something about it, they wanted ME to prove MY identity and legitimate claim to my own email address before they’d remove her! I told them to remove her account from my address or I would do it for them.

Another signed up to literally DOZENS of religious sites over the course of a couple of months, and I was swamped with newsletters, and emails from her other contacts there (I mean, dozens and dozens of them every week). I found out that she had two email accounts on the same service, and had both listed mine as the ’emergency secondary email’ AND forwarded all her email from her primary account to it. Sign up to a newsletter with the wrong address? Maybe a mistake. Sign up to no less than EIGHT different religious ‘social networking’ sites AND forward ALL your email to me? You’re a terminal fucking moron.

I got so fucked off in the end, that I used the ‘forgot password’ thing on her main account, and then went through the ‘please terminate my account’ procedure. Funnily enough, I haven’t heard from her again. OK, bad old me… I deleted her primary email account. I’m sure she was quite majorly inconvenienced. But think how much worse it COULD have been for her if I was more inclined? Imagine being ‘fraped’ on a Christian Support Network? lol.

Another signed up to Ancestry.com and duly made her entire family tree there. So not only did I have her details to fuck with should I desire, I had the rest of her extended family, going back generations – complete with supporting legal documentation, in some cases!

Another signed up to Facebook, who SAY they require verification, but activate your account anyway, and for two weeks I got like 200 FB notifications about her inane activities, until I logged into her Facebook and changed the password (to 5ILLYL1TTL3G1RL, which was probably infinitely more secure than her own original password). She tried password recovery more than twenty times over two months, then seemingly gave up. Or maybe guessed her new password? *shrug*

At least a half dozen have used my email to set up gmail accounts. Which means I am the one in possession of the verification code they need to reset their password. And as we all know, access to gmail is access to everything google, including checkout. I could seriously fuck up these people’s lives! (and who’s to say I still won’t at some point in the future when I’m bored?..)

These are not isolated incidents – as I say, this has happened almost weekly for years. I could list another hundred cases like the ones above.

I’ve been to a lot of these sites to look at their signup procedures, and you generally can’t just mistype an address, because you have to enter it twice, and often the ‘verify email address’ box wont accept a paste. So I really am at a loss to know how and why these people are managing to do this. Meanwhile, they should thank their lucky stars I’m not far more vindictive than I already am! (Although the ones who subsequently try actually doing a password reset ON my email account they’ve signed up with are REALLY playing with fire… ‘oh! I signed up with a fake email address that turns out to be real and now I’m stuffed. I know, I’ll try and steal that email address!’)

That said, it is getting a bit beyond a joke, now, so maybe I’ll make a regular feature of posting account usernames and passwords each time it happens and let you guys have at it… anyone up for doing an extensive rewrite of some guys cv on Jobs.com for starters?