Keep reading, this will amaze you!!!
A strange thing happened today, my wife calls to me from her PC, “Have you bought anything from Amazon?”
“Not recently” I replied, “Why?” “I’ve got an email her saying thank you for your order and another saying its been shipped”
I have a look at the emails and sure enough there they are using her correct email address. But I do not recognise the goods that are in the emails. I click on the link to look at the tracking details and try to log in, but my wife’s normal password does not get recognised – no surprise as she does not have an account!
So, then confused I click on ‘reset password’ and duly receive an email which I use to reset the password. Once that is done I then go to My Account and low and behold I am presented with the complete details of another persons Amazon account!!! Full name, which is exactly the same as my wife’s, but with different address, telephone number, last five figures of their credit card, credit card expiry date etc!
I check the other persons email address and find that it is the same as my wife’s, so now I am completely confused!!
So, what to do now? Being an honest person, I ring the other person and of course much to her surprise tell her what’s happened, understandably she is not too pleased at hearing this. She also now understands why she has not not received any emails about her purchase from Amazon as they have all gone to my wife!
After some discussion, the reason becomes apparent, it turns out that when she got her broadband from her ISP, they allocated her an email address based on her name and as we had the original name, they added a 1 to her name (which of course is the same as my wife), for example, name1@isp.com.
After more discussion, I find out that when she opened her Amazon account (this was her first order), her daughter who was doing the typing slipped up or forgot to add the 1 to end of the email name! Hence my wife became the recipient of the emails and through the ‘Forgotten Password’ link was able to reset the password and gain access to someone else account!
What about my wife’s Amazon account? Well as I said she before has never had one, we’ve always used mine, bit I have sent gift packages to her and given her email address as a contact, I initially though that this may have got confused with my account.
After finally calming the other person, I’ve forwarded the emails to her, suggested that she log in to her Amazon account to change her password immediately.
What about Amazon? I had a long conversation with their phone support, needlessly to say they were not too pleased to hear that this could and has happened – so am I from a point of view of protecting my own Amazon account!
I’ve never been a fan of numbers at the end of names in emails, if you use this type of email address (john.smith253@isp.com) as a logon to another system for email records and then later you accidentally type john.smith235@isp.com, then someone else is going to get your emails from that organisation and from our recent experience, plenty can go wrong.
Luckily, for the other person I didn’t order hundreds of pounds worth of goods from Amazon, but maybe one day someone else with a number in their email address won’t be so lucky!
I’d be interested to hear comments from others that have had similar experiences.
Beasley's Place 