It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian

Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by cirrus3 on Saturday November 11, 2023 @02:50PM (#38233862)

Do you have an example of what your email address is? Is it like "[email protected]" or "[email protected]" or something? Seems pretty crazy that someone chooses it randomly every week. Have you considered getting your own domain for your email to make this probably go away? Obviously changing addresses is painful, but living your life with a common email seems worse.

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by jen729w on Saturday November 11, 2023 @02:58PM (#38233930)

I’ll chip in as john.<reasonably common surname>@icloud.com.

I still get email from AT&T for John Notreallyme who I believe is in his 80s and lives in Montana. He signed up in-store and I got emailed all of his details.

I got the first email that asked me to confirm my email address. Obviously I did not do that.

It makes no difference. I don’t know why they bothered.

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by flatline on Saturday November 11, 2023 @03:12PM (#38234054)

Mine is first initial, somewhat-uncommon last name at gmail.com. Address acquired during the public beta back in 2004.

I regularly get reminders for dental visits in Oklahoma, purchase orders for machinery in Germany, and course registrations for some person who works in my industry and was easily searchable online.

It is not so intrusive to be problematic, and is mildly interesting.

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by macintux on Saturday November 11, 2023 @03:53PM (#38234393)

I’ve made a few online “acquaintances” over the years as I’ve figured out the real email addresses for the people for whom I receive email at iCloud. We check in each time I forward something to them.

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by rft on Saturday November 11, 2023 @07:16PM (#38235927)

It can be fun to figure out how to contact your “acquaintances” the first time this happens. You can't really email them, can you?

I had it when someone (or likely his partner) with the same (somewhat uncommon!) [email protected] used my email. I started digging and it turned out we both were/are PhD students, just totally different fields. Must have something to do with the name. I was happy that via the faculty site I found his "real" email. Nearly send him a really weird post card, I had only his postal address...

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by macintux on Saturday November 11, 2023 @09:30PM (#38236675)

It wasn't as hard as I expected. In one case, I found her last name on an email and it had an additional letter, so I just modified the address to match her name (we were both first initial/last name).

In the other case I must have simply experimented with first initial/middle initial/last name, and that worked.

One is a minister in the Boston area, so it's not hard to recognize her inbound emails.

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by temp111123 on Saturday November 11, 2023 @03:08PM (#38233996)

Mine is [email protected].

I get tons of email intended for the other "first last"s in this world.

Most memorable are an employment offer as an environmental engineer in New Zealand, the results of an environmental survey for some commercial real estate development in Houston, TX, and bankruptcy papers from an attorney in British Columbia, CA.

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Re:It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian by eddd-ddde on Saturday November 11, 2023 @02:55PM (#38233907)

I thought the same thing, in my whole life I have gotten exactly ZERO of this events.

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