Followers with strange email addresses

  • Unknown's avatar
    paulineoh · Member ·

    I’ve been noticing over the past couple of months that I’ve been getting email notifications that people with strange email addresses with outlook.com are following my blog. At times I get at least one a day, and I don’t even post very often! Are these phishing schemes, hoping I’ll connect with their email? Should I be concerned? It seems very odd that I should have that many followers.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    seatounschoollibrary · Member ·

    I’ve just posted a similar question, sorry I didn’t see yours. I hope someone replies soon and they might just reply to mine, preferably someone from WordPress security. I never email or click on the email addresses and I remove all spam comments.

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Thank you for reporting this. We’re aware of this issue and we’re working to block these spam followers.

    I know this is incredibly annoying, but I also want to reassure you that there is no way these spam followers can put your site, your content or your private account data in any danger.

    You can remove the spam followers under My Site > People, but that won’t prevent new follows from coming in. You might also consider temporarily disabling email notifications of new followers in your account settings until we manage to get these blocked. You’ll still see a notification each time in the WordPress.com admin bar, but at least you won’t have your inbox flooded with emails from fake subscriptions.

    Please don’t email these addresses back – another potential reason for this is that someone is fishing for emails which they can then use to try and spam directly, and emailing them back will only provide them with your personal email address – something they cannot get hold of by merely following your site.

  • Unknown's avatar
    paulineoh · Member ·

    thanks for your response. Yes, I figured they wanted my email address, so I did not respond to any of these emails. I’ll take your suggestion and disable email notifications so I can at least stop this annoyance. Appreciate your awareness of this issue, but it might be a good idea to notify WordPress users and warn them not respond to these emails.

    Thank you

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