bogus account with my (carefully guarded) email address

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  vikingjs · Member · Nov 17, 2011 at 1:23 am

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  The other day I got an email notification that someone had requested a password change for my wordpress.com account. WTF? I almost never even log into wordpress.com. But, if someone knew my member name, they could try to hack my account and I assumed that this message was a result of such shenanigans. I figured an actual change of my password was in order, just to be safe.

  Then I noticed the user name on the account: g2-587217eb4d0b8b1710372695336f2a58

  That’s actually not my user name at wordpress.com. Someone (a robot, obviously) created an account with my email address. Huh. I logged into the fake account, changed its password so whoever created it wouldn’t get access to it, and looked around for a way to delete the account entirely. I couldn’t find one.

  I know you had a snafu that led to people’s passwords being stored less securely, and therefore a spate of “reset your password” messages issued forth, but this message was absolutely not the same as those. I am fanatic about protecting my email password (as I write about here), and I have changed it recently. There is no other sign that my email account has been compromised.

  I logged in as the bogus user and checked to see if any comments or posts had been made; it appeared not. So, I set the password to something ridiculous and promptly forgot it.

  The only problem is, when I leave comments on people’s wordpress.com blogs, after I put in my email it auto-fills the rest with data from the bogus account.

  So, two things:
  1) how did there come to be an account with an email address the bad guy almost certainly didn’t have access to?
  2) how can I make that bogus account go away entirely, and never bother me again?
  Blog url: http://muddledramblings.com/

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  staff-blorbo · Staff · Nov 17, 2011 at 8:09 am

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  That looks like the username from Gravatar accounts before WordPress.com was integrated.

  Were you ever a Gravatar user prior to WordPress.com?

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  vikingjs · Member · Nov 17, 2011 at 4:58 pm

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  Ah, yes I probably was. I was pretty early on that boat.

  Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.

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  staff-blorbo · Staff · Nov 20, 2011 at 9:27 pm

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  You’re welcome!