Potential Ladbrokes scam/phishing attempt / email spoofing?
Discussion
Slight weirdness and looking for a bit of confirmation that I'm not worrying unduly.
I use an email address of the format firstname.lastname@gmail.com - I've had it for 20 years or more. On occasion over the years I have received registration emails for somebody else to the address firstnamelastname@gmail.com (without the "."). Gmail seems to ignore the full stop. This has always confused me - it's happened on and off for years every few months - too often to be a mistake/fluke, but not often enough to be somebody constantly using trying to use it as an email address. Very often it's registrations for websites, garages, estate agents or hotel bookings - I have actually emailed hotels before asking them to contact the booker by other means to ask them to be more careful what email address they type in!
I have read before about an oddity with gmail that at one time it recognised "."s separately - but if this were the case how could they not have realised by now? Emails both with and without "." in the address always come to me.
Anyway, the latest one of these was a registration email from Ladbrokes - I was going to ignore or unsubscribe as I usually do, but the following day I got another email telling me their "risk operations team" had made a business team to close my account and I shouldn't try to re-register! I have no idea how these betting sites work as it is of no interest to me - is this standard practice? Why would they do this? Or is it a bit scammy or a spoofed email? Or some identity fraud scam?
Any theories about either of the annoyances welcomed!
I use an email address of the format firstname.lastname@gmail.com - I've had it for 20 years or more. On occasion over the years I have received registration emails for somebody else to the address firstnamelastname@gmail.com (without the "."). Gmail seems to ignore the full stop. This has always confused me - it's happened on and off for years every few months - too often to be a mistake/fluke, but not often enough to be somebody constantly using trying to use it as an email address. Very often it's registrations for websites, garages, estate agents or hotel bookings - I have actually emailed hotels before asking them to contact the booker by other means to ask them to be more careful what email address they type in!
I have read before about an oddity with gmail that at one time it recognised "."s separately - but if this were the case how could they not have realised by now? Emails both with and without "." in the address always come to me.
Anyway, the latest one of these was a registration email from Ladbrokes - I was going to ignore or unsubscribe as I usually do, but the following day I got another email telling me their "risk operations team" had made a business team to close my account and I shouldn't try to re-register! I have no idea how these betting sites work as it is of no interest to me - is this standard practice? Why would they do this? Or is it a bit scammy or a spoofed email? Or some identity fraud scam?
Any theories about either of the annoyances welcomed!
Betting sites are hot on multiple sign ups. This all stems from the fact they don't like winning gamblers or those who take advantage of out of line prices/value which has the knock on effect that sharp betters as they are known have their accounts closed or restricted very quickly, so to get round it they try and sign up an new account with the wife/daughter/sons name etc. So the bookie has all sorts of means to track and block these attempts to circumnavigate their restrictions.
So someone with a similar name/email addy to yours has made multiple attempts to open a Ladbrokes account and their algo has spotted something it didn't like, maybe. Just one possibility.
So someone with a similar name/email addy to yours has made multiple attempts to open a Ladbrokes account and their algo has spotted something it didn't like, maybe. Just one possibility.
Mr-B said:
Betting sites are hot on multiple sign ups. This all stems from the fact they don't like winning gamblers or those who take advantage of out of line prices/value which has the knock on effect that sharp betters as they are known have their accounts closed or restricted very quickly, so to get round it they try and sign up an new account with the wife/daughter/sons name etc. So the bookie has all sorts of means to track and block these attempts to circumnavigate their restrictions.
So someone with a similar name/email addy to yours has made multiple attempts to open a Ladbrokes account and their algo has spotted something it didn't like, maybe. Just one possibility.
Basically this. Multi-accounting is a big problem for online bookmakers these days.So someone with a similar name/email addy to yours has made multiple attempts to open a Ladbrokes account and their algo has spotted something it didn't like, maybe. Just one possibility.
If you're not interested in gambling, and don't plan to open a Ladbrokes account, then I would just ignore the email as being banned won't affect you.
Chimune said:
Not doubting you but google ignoring the . In your address sounds incredibly unlikely.
I thought was common knowledge...https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=...
On the other hand, one of my aunties has problems remembering her email provider, and will randomly decide it's a gmail.com account, or an outlook.com account, or a yahoo.co.uk account, etc. when her login fails to work. She seems to think that the first part of the email address (i.e. her surname + name + some random numbers) is unique to her and thus should work with any .co.uk / .com she puts at the end
Edited by mmm-five on Tuesday 14th October 14:16
Chimune said:
Not doubting you but google ignoring the . In your address sounds incredibly unlikely.
It does.I have a similar thing happen as the OP but with my hotmail address, which is initialsurname. I can only think that, as I do, people have slightly different Gmail and Hotmail names and they get confused and mix them up and use the wrong domain.
In my case it's usually users in the US, although my surname originates in N Ireland. It's not a regular thing but over the years I've had medical bills, financial info, club memberships etc. I send some of them back but the only one who ever responded with the financial guy - then he did it again!
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