Seeing as eBay lets you type in an e-mail address and will give you the corresponding user ID, I don’t see it as odd at all.
Well, um, yeah, but… well, you see, earlier I had also stated this:
I know that was somewhat ambiguous. He was amoungst the people that were included in “most people don’t know it.” Ya see, he couldn’t just type in my email address, 'cause he didn’t know the one that I use for ebay.
Sorry, I missed that.
Is it really a difficult address to guess? I would suspect it was either easy for him to figure ourt, or he was able to look it up through some other method.
Either way, yeah, it’s getting a bit odd.
Yeah, I think so, probably difficult enough. It has nothing to do with my name at all and, like my name here, was a character from a book that I pulled off my shelf at random. Given that he doesn’t read as voraciously as I do, doesn’t read the genre I do and that I have over a thousand books on my shelves (yes, really, over a thousand, although many of those are geek books), I wouldn’t believe that he could easily pick it.
As I said though, I find it odd, but no harm was done.
Probably a bit obvious, but you didn’t mention to him about any recent ebay coin purchases did you? Sounds wierd to me, I would find out from him how he did it, you might have given away some info you thought was private and not know about it.
Actually, mine wasn’t the only one he had taken time to hunt down. But to answer Bippy, no, my coin collecting was something I did totally for me. I can’t think of anyone who really knew that I did it.
I just wonder how he did it.
You say your username relates to your ebay-only email address, but that he didn’t know your username. So how would he get it?
Well, I guess I can think of two possibilities. He could have taken an old email address of yours and done searches on any references he could find to it. Perhaps he found something (an old newsgroup posting or whatever) in which you refer to yourself as, or otherwise mention, the username. If it’s just a casual mention, it would be like a needle in a haystack, but if you actually referred to yourself with that handle, I guess it would be pretty easy to put the pieces together.
The other possibility is a little more disturbing. Has he ever had unsupervised access to your computer or sent you files over the Internet? He could have installed a trojan horse to spy on you and has just been deceiving you into thinking he’s a good detective. Hell, he could have been remotely watching every movement on your screen as you typed your OP!
Then again, maybe he just checked your cache files and cookies while you were in the bathroom taking a dump. Who knows?
I guess his behavior is a little weird, but bored people with computers do strange things. You say he’s a really close friend, so I’d give him the benefit of the doubt this time.
Khadaji, having been the victim of an online stalker (if ya want the details, email me - no one else really cares, I’m sure) I think it’s weird. WAY weird. Then again, I could be prejudiced because of my past bad experience. In any event, I’d have a REAL problem with it.
Khadaji, why dont you just straight up ask him how on earth he figured it out? Maybe you let something slip without realising…
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About the ebay thing, if you use credit cards for your purchases it can be really hard to change your user ID. My sister registered an account with Ebay and forgot the passwords/ID after leaving it go for months, and when she opened a new account found that she couldnt use her credit card with the new account, and if she did want to use it she had to send passports, bank statements drivers lisence to get verified. Sorry about the hijack, just its worth knowing if you do decide to change your ID.
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