A question for the more security-aware types out there

[missroserose]

What, exactly, might someone's motivation be for signing up for a social networking service with an email address that isn't theirs? Not only do you not get whatever notifications or what have you that you might want, but when the person who actually uses the email finally realizes that there's an easy way to stop the flood of messages labeled "Orkut", it's the work of five minutes to reset the password, delete the profile, and redirect the account to a dummy email address set up expressly for that purpose.

So...what *was* the point of that, exactly? Just see how long you can get away with it? Given that the pictures associated with the profile were of a fairly attractive girl, perhaps it was a spam account the person set up in hopes that any retaliation would be directed against my address? Any other motivations I'm missing, here?

Comments

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

I've had the same thing happen (well, aside from the kyoot pictures in the profile; I never really looked up the accounts), where someone uses my e-mail address to sign up for one forum or another, but I guess I always chalked it up to stupidity or typos on the other party's end.

In your case, it sounds more deliberate, but why they'd use an e-mail account someone has access to (and can thusly torpedo the Orkut account as you did) instead of a throwaway address from a free e-mail provider escapes me. Spam's quite likely -- maybe your e-mail address got randomly generated by a bot somehow; I've managed to accidentally roll extant accounts with random generators on more than one occasion. But still, that's...weird. (I'd have thought Orkut would require confirming e-mail accounts before allowing them to be used. Hell, I forgot Orkut existed.)

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

I'd have thought so too, but apparently not. As near as I could tell with my Brazilian Portuguese-to-English translator, the account was in active use, and none of the messages seemed to be "STOP SPAMMING ME ASSHOLE". And a while ago the person (at least, I assume the same person) had tried to break into my account - or at least, I was getting "You've requested to reset your password" messages, which I promptly denied. What's the big draw? It wasn't even a particularly enviable username...

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Given that you don't even have the password, since they generated it, I can't think of anything offhand.

[jamesd.livejournal.com]

Unlikely in this case but it's a way that might persuade you to visit the web page and potentially be attacked by some exploit hosted there.