Someone has signed up for a Twitter account using the name of Kenic Aspenridge and my email address. Should I notify Twitter or ignore the whole thing? I have some idea of who this might be because she has signed up for things with my address before. She’s not a relative or friend, btw. I just figured it out from some other clues. There is a “not my account” link of the bottom of the notification email, should I start there?
Assuming it’s a legit email (as opposed to a phishing scam), go ahead and click the button. My guess is that they’ll contact them and ask them to correct the email address, or the person won’t be able to activate it because of the incorrect email. However, if the name Kenic Aspenridge means something to you, you’re like SOL on that one. If it’s your IRL life and they’re using it to harass you, you might be able to get it shut down, but I’m not sure about that.
How do I tell if it is a legit email v. phishing scam? The logos and text all look fine.
The name Kenic Aspenridge means nothing to me.
Go through Twitter, not through an email. Confirm that the Twitter account actually exists, and report through Twitter’s website.
You need to see where the links actually go before you link them. The link might say “contact twitter here!” but if you mouseover and it goes to “13j5jk.2br3n23.23bj43j.com”, it’s a scam.
Generally the giveaway that somethin is a phishing scam is that one of the links in the email doesn’t go to the actual twitter site and then that link asking for your password (or just has a malicious flash ad on it or something.)
The usual XKCD on the topic.
And my tale of my experience with some client of Hawaiian Airlines attaching my email to his booking. Basically this guy had my same first name, and his last name was identical to mine with the first letter removed, and his middle initial was the same as the first letter of my last name, so his <firstname><middle initial><lastname>@gmail.com email that he was imagining he had was the same as my <firstname><lastname>@gmail.com email.
the mouseover looked good, so I managed to “screw my courage to the sticking-place” and clicked the link…and got a screen saying my email had been removed from the account. So, let us hope that is that. I would have ignored the whole thing but most of the tweets were in Arabic, which I could not understand.
My email is <lastname>@emailprovider.com, my prime suspect for this little caper is <m><lastname>@emailprovider.com. over the past 2 or 3 years, I know her address, her age, some of her medications, the names of some of her friends and relatives, and where she shops. Fortunately, I am not an identity thief.
This sounds like an innocent mistake of someone who’s sloppy with her typing of what seems like a nearly identical email address. I was the first person to get the gmail address of (my first initial)(mylastname)@gmail.com and I have innumerable people writing me thinking I’m every other permutation of my first initial. I also have people with the same initial/last name combo signing up for things that end up being sent to me, poor idiots, even though I’ll bet their real email address is (first initial)(middle initial)(last name)@gmail.com.
If you know this person’s real email address, you might try writing to Twitter’s customer service and suggesting they contact her to straighten this out. Maybe they know Arabic.
There is a huge and poorly understood business of scammers/spammers creating account for people on every conceivable social media site out there.
I get real email messages from these sites all the time: “Welcome to …”.
The idiots that run these sites somehow don’t require email verification. (Multiple :smack::dubious::(:mad:)
Once signed up, you continue to get updates about crap from that site forever.
The “Why” of these scammers is not always clear. On some sites, like Facebook, the account gets tied into spam accounts via Facebook’s algorithms. Then posts on those accounts cause you to get an email notifying you of the post, which is of course spam or something.
For dating sites, the spammers have messages sent to your account as if they were a person interested in you, but of course the real message is spam.
It could be greatly reduced by the site first asking for email verification. It’s almost as if they want the spammers to create the accounts. But no reputable company would surely want to falsely inflate their user base this way, would they?