belated Gmail data breach

Way back in 2009 or so I grabbed a disposable Gmail acct for getting on a forum. Otherwise I never use Emails for any other reasons.

As this was the only Email account I had penned down I used it again to sign into two more forums. The last one I actually had to look at the mail piled up to read a message.
There were 92 messages with the most from 2013 including a message from Gmail suspending my account saying it had been hacked and used by others. I never knew nor bothered to look.

Among the good stuff was a FedEx package could not be delivered I never ordered and a scam about how I was being looked up via the www and something had been added somewhere that was negative and would hurt me getting a job among other things. Of course they could fix it.

The other crap was sales pitches and online sex crap by the dozens of all flavors. Lots of failure to respond messages to everything and by 2016 it all stopped. I honestly had never looked at the inbox until recently.

As this account has no valid information on myself and has never been used in any manner there seems to be no threat nor damages. Like anyone knows who Tgd45can or anything similar would be. Names and dates were all invented of thin air.

It is funny in a way and not surprising. Online we can expect no security really.
I was shocked that it is still an active account after so long unused and the data breach.

I constantly get messages in my spam folder (in a non-Gmail account) asking me to unsubscribe from something to which I never subscribed in the first place.


<Delete> is a very useful command.

Yeah..... I was wondering about that unsubscribe thing. It made no sense at all.

What us the goal behind that scam anyway.

My guess is that if you unsubscribe, you verify that your account is active. That would give them a better opportunity, perhaps, to go after you more directly.

On the other hand, since the marginal cost of sending out one message among however many thousands (tens of thousands?) is effectively zero, it costs the spammer nothing to continue to do this. In fact, it's probably more expensive to prune the list than to keep it as it was when he/she bought it.



I'm always tempted to respond to the ones asking for sex with "Sorry, you can't afford me." But that's still giving them more information than I want to give.

I think xterra is correct with the addition if you respond to delete it verifies a valid account and now the spammer has a confirmed address to sell.

xterra said:

My guess is that if you unsubscribe, you verify that your account is active. That would give them a better opportunity, perhaps, to go after you more directly.

Click to expand...

MEequalsIxR said:

I think xterra is correct with the addition if you respond to delete it verifies a valid account and now the spammer has a confirmed address to sell.

Click to expand...

That's what I said.

In that case verification denied. These bums need to get a job.
It must be frustrating to have a 98% fail rate at your chosen job.

It was the selling part I think that is one of the big draws in addition to the constant dunning to verified addresses.

8enotto said:

In that case verification denied. These bums need to get a job.
It must be frustrating to have a 98% fail rate at your chosen job.

Click to expand...

I imagine it's much higher failure rate than that. But it's not a normal sort of job, since it's possible to send out many thousands, if not millions, of spam emails for virtually nothing, and you don't even have to be there while it's going on.

I'm reminded of the old joke about a blind man selling pencils, and he has a sign out "pencils, $1000." A passerby remarks that that's silly, as nobody will pay that for a pencil. "Yes," says the man, "but I only have to sell one."

Farmer needs to raise money, so he decides to raffle off a cow. He sells 1,000 tickets for $1 each.

The day the raffle ends, his daughter draws a ticket -- and at that moment, his hired helper comes up and tells the farmer that the cow died.

"What will we do?" asks his daughter anxiously.








The farmer thinks for a minute, and says, "No problem, we'll give the winner his dollar back."