Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern.
I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.
> discuss the future of entire countries
And so, as a side note, it is revealed who actually runs the world ...
Not as if we didn't really know already.
At least the titles/descriptions didn’t contain anything to consider pulling a Snowden about it.
They discuss how to swing the elections with funds and think tanks in order to increase profits.
And if the outcomes of said election has a huge effect on foreign policy and geopolitics, AKA "national security", then the feds arrive and only talk to the big wigs.
Just because some people accidentally invite journalists into Signal meetings to discuss active bombing campaigns, doesn't mean everyone running a financial institution is vying to be named the next President of Argentina.
You are being knee-jerk judgemental.
They didn't say those things don't happen, just that it didn't appear the comms they received by mistake looked like less sinister interactions with the political world.
Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.
How so? Other than a funny coincidence, how would that ever come up anywhere in anything unless you both lived in a tiny community where everyone knows each other. I just don't understand how someone born on the same day as you having the same name was "irritating".
Allegedly Jr. had a lengthy record including some drug offenses and something like a DUI / DWI. Naturally Sr. And Jr's records got crossed since they have the same First, Last, and Address, which caused Sr. many headaches including that we required a driving record check that would fail on a DUI / DWI.
Because, lacking a national identity number, the natural way to distinguish to people in a system when the name wouldn’t do is going to be age/birthdate or location.
I've also met two others with the same name, purely coincidentally, not related. I worked on an access/security software team at a major bank (about 350k employees internationally at the time), I found 3 bugs just by being me. Since even SSN/Tax-Id varied, there were several ways to match identity and I had conflicts in a couple of them with other employees. Last Name + last-4 of tax/ssn/national-id (for whatever country the employee was in) was one of them. I don't recall the other two right now, been about 15 years.
Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.
Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.
One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal [email protected] so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.
It was his iPad's fault, apparently.
It basically defines the organization.
I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the [email protected] address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.
What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.
But I have a relatively rare first name and even rarer last name due to my dad having a very rare first name, so I easily snagged first.last. Pretty sure to this day I've never even seen anyone with my dad's first name (or my last name).
Meanwhile, my coworkers name is literally Adam Smith and his usernames tend to be adamsmith2 or 3 or 4.
I once worked at a place that has two Brian Smiths who worked at desks across from each other. That was quite bizarre.
I am not the horror film director I share a name with.
Just curious, do gmail accounts ever expire? Will I ever get the chance to snag the other one? Or does it forever belong to my nemesis and life-long enemy?
It's somewhere in the document.
Looking at my text messages, surely these are a mix of serious business and the starts of scams. How unsavory to think that helping someone could be a bad thing.
One of them was a director at Google, but I think she retired. Always assumed that meant I'd get a lame work email if I applied there.
I've gotten student financial aid docs, various product mailing lists, order receipts etc... it's amazing how many places take an email address and just start spamming without any validation at all.
My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.
It's bizarre though... who puts down an email address they don't own on a job application?!
Turned out the whatever tool our recruiter used spit out „[email protected]“ even though the person in question doesn’t own that email.
I've gotten a wide enough variety of stuff (mortgage paperwork, homeowners insurance, game service accounts) that some of it has to be organically entered, but that is a good note. Crazy that any system would be set up that way, but HR tech is a clusterfuck.
I am [email protected], but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar is happening in some instances.
Its annoying especially since we have the same bank and they are not very good at paying their credit card on time. I therefore get their bank emails. Initially It will always have me confused as weight wait. I don't have any balance on my credit card. Was this fraud?
There car has a lot of problems.
I got on twitter pretty early too, and just have a short first time as my @, and occasionally get DMs about getting my @, but no one wants to hand out cash for it. The most I've been offered is $50. But most just expect me to give it for free.
My complete name is rare, but I share it with a journalist who's quite a bit older than me.
If you are famous enough, people might even deliberately name their kids after you.
I’d switch firms immediately if that’s their level of opsec awareness
No matter what format you hand a recipient a document in, they can always make a photocopy and pass it on.
And this is still irrelevant to sending email to the wrong recipient, so I don’t know why you’re stuck on infra security.
Email is not an end-to-end secure data protocol without the use of client side encryption/decryption like PGP/GPG, but even then, sender/receiver and time are all in the envelop metadata.
if you attach documents 'inside' the mail (i.e. MIME encoded multipart) that is most definitely not secure.
1) you do not know how that mail gets delivered, not necessarily via servers that support encryption 2) you do not know how that mail, or the attachment, gets stored on the local machine 3) you do now know if the mail, or attachment, is sent to someone else 4) you cannot revoke the access to the document once the Need To Known stops
In our ISMS, sending Highly Sensitive data (ex: customer data) by attaching directly to a mail, is strictly not allowed by the IT charter. We explain it during an on-boarding meeting to all new staff members. And it's a fireable offense.
I spent 3 months on secure document transfer portal system, got scrapped after 4 months because clients wanted their forms as Word/PDF and they wanted them without hopping through any hoops.
Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.
Neither of our names can be confused with a last name and yet I had multiple people writing to it incorrectly, including: as the email attached to a Diners credit card (I called Diners and they asked me what's the right one and "if I don't know the right one how do I know that it's wrong"), as the email for a school 400 km from home (another family must have had the same idea), once for some lawyer stuff (I then learnt that about 100 people in Italy do have my wife's name as a very uncommon last name), and lately as the recovery email for another Google account.
Edit: side note, your username is also the name of my favorite fusball table maker.
Still annoying, but not as bad as gmail. I just got an email, in Italian, about someone adding a passkey to their ebay account. No way to tell ebay it's not their address / it's not my account.
It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.
At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common [email protected] and are free to add dots wherever you like.
A few years later Tina Fey did those commercials where she pulled in other Tina Feys and we all messaged the group like “Hey! They did it too!”. I’m sure many others did it. The world is so connected now that you should reach out and learn about your “alter-egos”.
Anyways, this reminded me of that and it’s nice to see other people have similar experiences being weird with, I guess themselves.
That's a felony in many places.
You could easily be a paw in an identity theft play like that.
I suspect it may fall afoul of a law about making false statements to the government, but that's distinct from fraud.
Impersonating someone at their behest as a favour is unlikely to be dishonest.
Key note because in case someone decides to go bad faith here, I think the gp comments use case of fraud is a positive thing (if a bit dangerous). Redefining a term just because you don't like the pejorative implications is not a positive thing, though.
It's pretty simple: they are deceiving the other party that the document was handed to the right person, the consequences of which range from 'meh' to spending 6 years behind bars.
Let's say this was a summons for a court case. Then the judge would believe the papers were served properly, when in fact they were never served. Permission doesn't enter into it here, it is wilful deception by two parties of a third. The same name should not normally be enough to get away with this but assuming the story is real (there are many reasons to doubt this, such as the ID matching the name, but nothing else) it all depends on who does the checking. In some cases you might not even go home without a small detour in case you are found out (for instance, because the person handing the document over is familiar with the real recipient).
So, jurisdiction matters, what that document was matters, whether the permission was granted in writing (procuration), who the counterparty was, what the value of the document was, whether the parties lived in the same state/province or country and whether or not the permission was communicated to the person passing the document to the wrong recipient (probably not) and lots of other factors besides, such as the person giving permission still evading some legal obligation, which - conveniently - the story doesn't relate (and which hinges on what that document was).
And that's before we get into the wilder options of the second person being social engineered because after all, the only way they could be sure that they were acting on behalf of the real recipient would be to check their identity, in person, and with someone who is able to do that in a way that is legally binding.
I ask the office clerk: "Hi, I'm here to retreive the documents for X". He checks my ID and gives me the documents without asking for written permission from the other X.
It's deception by omission, but there is no fraud. I was legally allowed to do this. It's also a win for everyone because it avoids complications.
Where's the crime?
My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then.
I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area.
Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.
You wouldn't believe some of the things that have shown up in my inbox.
I used to get very sensitive documents sent to me. A lot of juvenile cases. I suspect people could have gone to jail for sharing it.
It's really on the sender, to make sure, but it's still a nasty situation.
It eventually stopped. I think they ended up registering a different domain name. I used to diligently respond, when sent erroneous documents, but never got a reply. I destroyed them, but there's no telling where other copies might have gone.
I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.
At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”