Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Gigachad 1485 days ago
The cumbersome way would be to confirm the email, do a password reset and then deactivate the account.
1 comments

I'm hesitant to do this because occasionally I've been blocked by some second factor for password resets, but at that point I've confirmed the email.
I would expect a phone number link request at that point for suspicious activity, which actually is suspicious this time. And that is assuming it's even possible to deactivate the account without going into a black hole phone tree which is what I expect these days. Even if you successfully deactivate it, a service you aren't using now has data on you that won't ever actually be deleted. Trying to fix it feels like it's almost playing into the scammer's hands.
They're not scammers - I've just got a firstname.lastname@gmail account which means a zillion confused people think they're me.

https://xkcd.com/1279/

Yes this is so annoying! I think it also sometimes happens when email addresses are communicated through speech instead of writing.

Though I tend to just block the sender domain (because they're always from services that I'm never going to use anyway) and ignore the email just on the off-chance that someone is trying to scam me in some weird way. (Plus I really just don't care enough to deal with it unless the email is clearly important or sent by an actual person)