Someone used my email address to create a WordPress account

  • Unknown's avatar
    llamaeggphobos24747 · Member ·

    Please help. It was not me.

  • Unknown's avatar
    lmanzer00 · Member ·

    Hey!

    Sorry to hear having a tough time getting into the account or creating one with your email address.

    If you are looking to regain control or prove ownership there is a great article for that. https://wordpress.com/support/account-recovery/#if-ownership-cannot-be-established

    If it’s actually a different issue please elaborate a bit more.

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    Hi there, if you do not need or want this account, you can close it following this guide: https://wordpress.com/support/close-account/

    Hope that helps but post back here if you have any other question about this.

  • Unknown's avatar
    llamaeggphobos24747 · Member ·

    Someone used my email address to create a WordPress.com account. I’d like to know how it was done and what to do about it. Interestingly, when I tried to change the password, the default that seemed to come up was the user’s name. I changed the password to something else, logged in again and have tried to delete the account.

    I got this message.
    Sorry, there was a problem closing your account. Please contact support.

    Please advise.

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    Hello again, If someone knows your email address, they would be able to use it to create an account. You would also have gotten an email from WordPress.com asking you to verify it, so that might be the missing step if you didn’t have a chance yet to follow the information in the verification email.

    I’ve tagged this thread for Staff assistance with this. Thanks for your patience.

  • Unknown's avatar
    llamaeggphobos24747 · Member ·

    Thanks! I didn’t get a verification message. I checked spam too. However when I tried to log in to WordPress.com for help with a different problem I was able to log in using my address and no password. Just hitting return seemed to work. Again, I hadn’t created a WordPress.com account.

    I think there’s something weird going on.

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-heroponriki · Member ·

    @llamaeggphobos24747 – did you recently purchase an Akismet Plus plan? If so, a WordPress.com account was created in conjunction with this purchase as Akismet uses WordPress.com user accounts for account management.

    Can you confirm whether or not this was the case? Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    llamaeggphobos24747 · Member ·

    Yes. That’s what happened. Would they have also assigned me a user name like “llamaeggphobos24747”?

    If there was some fine print that mentioned that they were creating a WordPress.com account for me, I missed it and I appologize for the confusion and panicked posts here. If they do this automatically and don’t tell people, maybe they should?

    Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-heroponriki · Member ·

    Thanks for confirming! Akismet has been experimenting with a sign up process that automatically creates a WordPress.com account if one doesn’t already exist for the email address used at the time of purchase. Since it’s an automatic process, a randomly generated username is created.

    You can change that username by following these steps here if the random one isn’t to your liking:

    https://wordpress.com/support/change-your-username/

    I’ve passed your feedback on to the Akismet team as well.

    Let us know if you have any questions or need help with anything else.

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