When I graduated from local BBSes to the Internet back in the day, I ran into an issue early on. Murphy as a handle was way too common, and so it would be regularly taken on any service I attempted to sign up with. So I adopted a new handle, one I swiped from a track from a band I really dug. I scored an early Gmail account with this nickname, and it was pretty much my online identity for decades. I ran all my accounts through that Gmail identity, and it’s been great insofar as I have all my documentation in a single spot. I once had to prove to Audible that I’d bought an audiobook seven years previous, and it took me one quick search to find the receipt.
One day I kept getting notifications on that email that someone was trying to break into my Spotify account. I changed the password and forgot about it. Not too long after, it happened again, and then I started to get the occasional email that was clearly meant for someone else. I started doing some detective work on a spare evening, and what I found was curious, to say the least.
It turns out there is an Australian woman whose name is somewhat similar to my Gmail account. The first two letters corresponded with the first two letters of her first name, and the last five are her last name. And somehow, she started using my email address to try to sign up for things, and if it told her that the account was already taken, she’d try to reclaim it.
I was never able to identify what her actual email address was to tell her to knock it off; I’d just get a few weird messages now and again, and then pore over them to try to figure out what the fuck was going on or if I could learn anything new. Once I got put on an email chain about a real estate dispute, and despite emailing everyone else involved, I never got a response from them. So I just wrote the whole thing off as a periodic annoyance I’d have to deal with.
One night, though, I’d just finished a long transcription job and it was the wee hours of the morning. Super tired and punchy, I checked my email before calling it, and I noticed a Hello Fresh invoice in my inbox. It had been a while, so I’d forgotten about the email impersonator; I first wrote it off as one of those fake invoice scams. But then I noticed it was actually from the company, and I suddenly got paranoid that my credit card had been compromised. So, without thinking, I clicked the forgot password link and broke into the account.
At which time I realized that it was my Australian friend, and she’d accidentally signed up for HelloFresh.au using my email address, and I’d just stolen her account.
Whoops.
I considered leaving it be as an object lesson in paying attention. A real jerk would’ve placed a bunch of random orders using her account. But I try not to be an asshole without reason, so I decided I was going to stay up and try to fix what I’d just done.
I contacted Hello Fresh’s Australian customer service chats, and I proceeded to go through several levels of increasingly confused CSRs who would listen to my explanation of how this weird woman would sign up using my address, and I accidentally stole her account and wanted to give it back, and then they would shrug and escalate me up the chain.
Finally I reached someone who not only believed me, but had the authority to pull up her account details and fix it. He told me he’d take care of it, and he promised to inform her that the email address she was using belonged to someone else. He resolved the issue, and the mystery emails dried up entirely. I occasionally still get random messages or login attempts, as you do, but they never seem to be my Australian friend anymore.
So here’s to you, Almond, the Australian Hello Fresh customer service manager. If that’s not your real name, it should be.