I’ve always had trouble with getting e-mail in Gmail account that’s not intended for me. The account name is my first initial and last name. But it’s at least been to someone with my last name.
Today I’ve received about 10 order confirmation and other emails to someone named Jenna in Plano TX. “Jenna” doesn’t have my last name or my first initial, so how she would be typing in my address is beyond me. She’s ordered books, steaks, tomatoes, hedge clippers, signed for for dating, surveys, coupons, and more. All together the orders are probably more than $2000.
I have e-mailed each place saying I don’t know this person and I don’t live in TX and to please remove my e-mail address, and to consider the order may be a scam.
I’ve checked my credit cards and there are no charges on them (I have zero balance on all so that makes it easy.)
Is this some sort of scam or does this person just shop a LOT and get their e-mail address REALLY wrong? If it is a scam why would they give a fake e-mail address that didn’t contain their first initial or last name?
Do you have your own domain with catch-all forwarding? I own a .org.uk domain with my father’s initials and you only have to transpose two letters to get somewhere very famous. So he gets many emails intended for there.
My email address is a first initial,last name and number - but it’s not my initial and name. It’s my husband’s. Someone else apparently had the same address minus the number, because it wasn’t available when I got the account. If the number gets left off my email address, the email will go to someone else, who will wonder why I have this address when my name and initial don’t match.
Let’s say my name is Fred Smith, I’m fsmith@gmail.com and her name is Jenna Davis. Not even similar, our initials are a completely different set of letters.
I’m not quite ready to change my passwords but might be a good idea.
Nothing from the company e-mails seems to be phishing, they are order confirmations. In fact when I replied to the e-mails most every one responded saying they would take my e-mail out of their system.
I searched for her, didn’t get any hits from whitepages.com or Google. She also ordered $679 worth of steaks from OmahaSteaks, 2 $289 hedge trimmers, a $384 painting from artwork.com, and something worth $178 from GetOrganized.com.
There’s a fair amount of debate about this among security researchers. Current thinking is that spammers generally don’t care if the addresses they’re selling are valid or not, since they’re re-harvesting all the time and most of them will be, and that the economics of this sort of “reply confirms existence” processing don’t add up any more now that the Internet has exploded. It may have been true in the early 00’s, but probably isn’t any more.
I’d be much more concerned about it being a scam to harvest bank/credit account numbers, which obviously are still valuable.
And it would be easy to check that the order confirmations came from the real addresses of real companies. Scholastic? Omaha Steaks?
BTW a box set of Harry Potter and box set of 39 Clues wouldn’t go very far in a library’s collection, but they would make nice gifts. Really nice gifts.
Wow, that’s random. Maybe it’s her card that’s being scammed? I think, what I would do in this situation, is call the actual phone number for one of those companies and let them know what is going on. It might not do much, but at least you will have tried.
Omaha Steaks are gifted all over the country; it seems like people rarely order them for themselves. We get them from my in-laws for X-mas. They have a good reputation and good marketing, but frankly they don’t compare to New Braunfels Smokehouse. Them’s good meat.
I am wondering if it could be an autofill error. I have entered incorrect information in address fields before, then that incorrect info pops up on autofill next time I use the interwebs in a consumatory manner; I have to be careful to select the correct one of the choices from the drop-down or I’ll accidentally enter the wrong info.
It sounds like she was buying gifts - box sets of books, Omaha Steaks…
Don’t the order confirmations have a customer phone number listed with the shipping address? Just call it and ask to speak to Jenna. If she comes to the phone, tell her she’s using your email address. If the person who answers has no idea who Jenna is, then there’s probably something more sinister going on.