Apparently for many sites, user retention & money are more important than verifying an email address up front. He visits the scummiest betting and dating sites, so I'm not very surprised.
I also get their college results, government assistance, a payday loan company, pinterest and subscriptions to newsletters sent to me for them.
Ive mailed them directly, multiple times but they dont seem to care. I'm now returning the favor, signing them up for all the crappy sites when i need a throwaway.
To deepen the problem gmail actually ignores periods in email so even if johnsmith@gmail.com already exists its possible create accounts for both john.smith@gmail.com and j.o.h.n.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com because although google will absolutely treat those 3 as the same thing and route all messages to any of the above to our first fellow randombob.com treats those as 3 unique email addresses.
This was actually exploited by the fellows that robbed Washington states unemployment system during the pandemic applying for unemployment for folks that didn't need it including humiliatingly enough actual workers who worked for the washington state employment security division. To make their robbery more ergonomic multiple fraudulent accounts were set up with email addresses that differed only by periods. In this instance it only worked of course because they were indeed able to verify their email accounts.
In other instances for example myFico has weak protections on signing up. You can use ANYONE's email address to sign up but strong protections on actually accessing information. This means in effect if someone signs up as you as actually happened to my wife you will never be able to get them to stop spamming you with that persons personal information nor make the person stop giving out your email.
I wasted 15 minutes of my life trying to explain that the address given actually was my wife's email address. Bitched to their credit union/other institutions about the persons financial data being leaked, created a complaint with the FCC. YADA YADA nobody cares about properly implementing email verification or leaking people's financial information.
I continually get a lot of emails, sometimes with private information to first name.lastname@gmail.com where people with my same name just use that without caring that it is not their email address. You probably aren't getting that job offer and you probably aren't getting that bank load approved without being able to see the emails.
For a while I tried to notify the senders but they rarely reacted or even provided a way to contact them. Now I worry about it becoming a scam vector so I just delete them.
