a thought!!

[somanyholes]

Might be of interest
An acquaintance of mine had their bank account abused the other day. The circumstances around it are laughable the transactions occurred on lastminute.com this was on a new account, so it was the first transaction on the account the name of the person on the account/delivery address was completely different to the card holder, it even sounded Nigerian
The email address used was, wait for it .... wewantyourmoney@yahoo.com

This lead onto another conversation with another friend, they have a system for trying to see what shops etc  are doing with their private info, whilst being a very simple system, it provides you with an insight on which companies you may trust, and companies that are best to avoid in future.
Basically.
1. Buy your own domain name, or use a service such as google which allows you to prepend to your email address
2. For each shop you use, setup an email alias. e.g. idnet@mydomain.com, beer@mydomain.com so on and so forth.
Obviously only supply each shop with it's own email alias.
You may then start to see spam arriving at specific shops from other domains and other suspicious mail that may indicate, that, one your shop doesn't give a dam about your privacy, or that they have had their database compromised. I know this isn't a perfect solution but it does certainly give you more information than you would normally have.
Just a quick thought, if you are using your own domain it might be wise to make sure you have whois privacy enabled.

[Glenn]

Thanks for the info So

[Rik]

Useful tip, So.

[Technical Ben]

I use to do this, but just to avoid spam. I have 2 email addresses. One for registering, and one for family and friends only.
But that's a really good idea. One slight problem is "random" email spam, where they just send it to "johnsmith@yahoo.com" etc, because it's a common name. So you will have to be unique about your email.

Also, with the new account thing. Sounds like someone stole some post. Else how can they get the account number?

[somanyholes]

Also, with the new account thing. Sounds like someone stole some post. Else how can they get the account number?

He thinks it may have been through argos over Christmas, which wouldn't surprise tbh.

As far as the email account goes. You would create an alias for every single shop you use. So you could end up with many email aliases. The purpose of doing all this is to see which accounts get spam, not to stop it in the first place. Your trying to establish which shops are leaking your data knowingly or unknowingly. As far as them receiving general spam it's unlikely if your doing it under your own domain.

Hope this makes sense.

[Niall]

I did this with my website that I've recently closed down. Sadly it doesn't work for long. After a while you'll find that they check who owns the domain and if you've registered it with a company that demands your full info, they get your name with a simple search. Within a couple of months I was receiving emails with my full name on, which in itself was a give away as I never use my full name for online shopping.

Oops, I forgot to add that the emails then start coming in with addresses like you mention above. I suppose it may work if you use a specific name to specific shops though, rather than generic ones. I really wish I'd kept some of the emails I was getting to check. One thing I do remember is that the emails weren't traceable, so I had no way of knowing where they came from, if they weren't directly from shops advertising things.

[somanyholes]

I did this with my website that I've recently closed down. Sadly it doesn't work for long. After a while you'll find that they check who owns the domain and if you've registered it with a company that demands your full info, they get your name with a simple search. Within a couple of months I was receiving emails with my full name on, which in itself was a give away as I never use my full name for online shopping.

#

That's where this comes in 

Just a quick thought, if you are using your own domain it might be wise to make sure you have whois privacy enabled.

One thing I do remember is that the emails weren't traceable,

Generally there is some info in them that points you in the right direction, even if you have to dig through the mail headers. I know what you mean though, they don't make it easy. But at least you know if you get a mail to ebuyer@yourdomain.com someones been naughty

[Niall]

That's what I meant though. In theory it should work, but if spam emails send you ones like that you could get HMV@domain.com or ebuyer@domain.com just with spam adverts for the actual sites.

Pretty pointless spam, but I saw a lot of it as the years went by. Admittedly it didn't happen much but I would get maybe 6-10 a week like this, and ones that linked to a fake site. Maybe the idea was to eventually get you to go to the fake site?

I was never sure what happened, but I didn't use my domain for actual online shopping, I use a hotmail account for that. I did see spam bots trying to post on my wordpress comments, so it could have just been random spam generated, just to flood networks.

[somanyholes]

I suppose the only way forward is to be really anal and use cryptic email addresses for the stores. e.g. ebums@domain.com would really be ebuyer@domain.com. It all starts to become a pain in the ebum at this point Mate hasn't had these issues but doesn't surprise me they may exist. It sounds like it might be better the gmail way then where you can append to the front of your email address, however, gmail opens up a whole new can of worms....