Don’t be those people: carefully enter your email address when you need to, and then carefully check that you got it right. This is why so many forms have you enter your email address twice: a lot of people don’t check.
Know what your email address is. Surprisingly, many do not, particularly in populations that are more mobile- than email-centric.That actually includes a number of things: The critically important lesson is simply this: This is about something much more important: using your email address. Unless this was a spammer going through a lot more work than I expect spammers to go through, I just don’t get it. In fact, ask.leo is about as far away from the person’s real name as it would be from “John Smith”. Their real name had nothing to do with “ask leo”.The PayPal account was opened with a real name, which I’ve obscured above, and as the email address. One of my many email addresses is (Don’t bother sending email to it - direct email is ignored specifically because I don’t use it publicly at all. If your name is John Smith, it seems nonsensical to use that as your display name for an account whose email address is, say, I get why spammers do it (all the time), but I don’t get why “real” people do it. However, there’s another mistake I see frequently that completely baffles me: email addresses that make no sense given the name. (It’s a feature… or so I’m told.)Īs we’ll see in a moment, that might have played a role. On other systems, they are treated exactly the same - periods are ignored. On some email systems, and are two different email addresses. One thing’s for certain: it’s not your email address.Īnother less common but equally understandable error is period confusion. It could be an unused address or it could belong to someone else. If your email address is and you accidentally type in johnsm 1, that’s a completely different email address. The one that I can actually understand is a simple typo. The error that caused all this is that the person attempted to open a PayPal account using the wrong email address - my email address instead of their own. I wonder if it already has any money in it? Or if it’s linked to a bank account that does? The mistake If I wanted to, I could go in and change all the additional recovery information associated with the account to cement my ownership. Once that arrived and I set a new password, the account would be in my control. I could just ask for a password reset using the email address on the account… I’ll probably be asked to log in, but I won’t know the password.
If I click the confirmation link, I’ll be taken to the PayPal account, albeit in German. When I allowed Gmail to translate the message, that part was clear:Īnd yes, before you ask, I examined the email headers and verified that the message was legitimate and not a phishing attempt. Not only was it a welcome message, it was also an email-confirmation message. That it was in German, and the sending domain was “”, led me to believe that the person attempting to create the account is in Germany. That’s the German-language version of the “Welcome to PayPal” message that’s sent after you create a PayPal account. It highlights something critical you need to know to keep your accounts safe. Seeing as how the result would be my owning their PayPal account, I really don’t understand how they could make such a serious mistake. I suspect they weren’t trying to give me their account, but made a mistake when setting it up. Someone tried to give me a PayPal account this morning.
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