Is Someone Using My Email Address?

[finley1991]

I don't think it's a big deal, but I keep getting e-mails from Bebo.com and myspace.com asking me to add people to my "friends" list. I don't have accounts on either but someone (or two people... appears to be 2) have used my e-mail address as their contact address.

Now, in the past, I have been known to put in a bogus e-mail address so I wouldn't get a lot of junk. BUT I put in an old e-mail... one I used to have. Not just a random one.

I don't want to change my e-mail because I've had the same e-mail address for 10 years.

Should I just ignore the e-mails from these people? I don't want to waste my time responding to them because they aren't intended for me!!!!

Any suggestions?

 

[jenniferknapp]

Contact myspace.com and bebo.com and tell them that it isn't you. It may also be spam..

 

[ChefLisa]

A friend of mine is having the same issue with MySpace. I speculate it might be some type of fraud. Might want to check snopes to find out if there is something going on.

Lisa

 

[Pampered Laura]

Thats probably spam, I get emails "about my myspace account" all the time, and I've never had a myspace account.

 

[finley1991]

Good to know! Okay.. I think I'll ignore it. I already blocked the bebo ones so I don't even see them.

You all are the best! Thanks for your help!

 

[katie0128]

You should at least send an email to to myspace and bebo and let them know of the problems you are having. A friend's email address was hijacked and when she reported it, she found out that the person that stole it was sending all sorts of xxx porn using the email... some of it was of kids. Because she reported the fraud, she was not held liable for the illegal activity associated with it. At least if you report it, then if anything ever happens you can show that you reported the fraud.

 

[finley1991]

Wow... okay, I will do that.

 

[finley1991]

Okay... just e-mailed both that my e-mail was being used by another. I guess that must happen with myspace a lot because they had that problem on their troubleshooting link. Of course when I did what they said to do, it didn't work so I've e-mailed them both so we will see!!!!

 

[jenniferknapp]

A lot of spammers usually pick a popular site, and then spam irrelevant addresses saying something about your myspace account..... paypal has the same problem quite a bit. That is probably why it was in the troubleshooting link. An actual person may not be using your email address...

 

[The_Kitchen_Guy]

It's called "spoofing" and it's what happens when you have an account in a widely used site (like myspace) or, if you're like me, have your own web domain. I get spam from jrmanning dot com all the time. I usually mask my email addy by listing it as text - jrmanning at jarmanning dot com.I'm not sure there's much else you can do. Greg has an anti-spam tool in place here - you may have noticed that email addresses up here are converted graphic images that cannot be selected as text. A device called a spam 'bot cruises web sites, like myspace or even CS, and it latches on to email addresses and copies them. This harvesting of email addresses is how spammers get your address, and the less scrupulous ones will spoof it to use as the source of spam.Ain't technology grand?

 

[chefann]

The smart spam bots "know" that people spell out email addresses and will look for that, too.

 

[jrstephens]

Spam drives me insane! I have a yahoo address just for when I have to put my email out the on the web for things. That has cut down my spam drastically on my home and PC email addresses. I changed my home email jsut b/c of all the spam I was getting and then started putting my yahoo on anything that I have to provide an address for. I am suprised I do not get it in my PC address with it being an so much, but I have not gotten any YET.

I highly recommend having another address for this purpose.

 

[The_Kitchen_Guy]

Yahoo offers "disposable" email addys for the very reason. I've got a couple that I use whenever a website asks for my email address. When that one starts getting spam, I just delete it and start another.Spammers are creative and find lots of cr3a1v3 ways to get r3pl1c4 watc# messages past f1lt3rs.

 

[janetupnorth]

Spammers are creative and find lots of cr3a1v3 ways to get r3pl1c4 watc# messages past f1lt3rs.

Ok, you know it is bad when you see that and immediately read

lots of creative ways to get replica watch messages past filters

without even thinking about it!!!!

Guess I get too much spam!

 

[finley1991]

Bebo.com finally e-mailed me back and said that they had cancelled the account with my e-mail address. Which is good because when I went on to clear this us, I had them e-mail me my password so I could cancel the account and the guy using my e-mail is a want-to-be-pro wrestler! It's just not right!!!!

 

[The_Kitchen_Guy]

Yahoo offers "disposable" email addys for the very reason. I've got a couple that I use whenever a website asks for my email address. When that one starts getting spam, I just delete it and start another.

Spammers are creative and find lots of cr3a1v3 ways to get r3pl1c4 watc# messages past f1lt3rs.

That represents several of the nicer ones I get. There's also a lot of V1ag4a and C3ali2 subject lines, not to mention several that I won't post here.

 

[jenniferp417]

I use Gmail for my email - and they have a *great* spam-catcher - I see very little of it.