Bogus Account in My Name

[RichardHMorris]

I received an email to my Gmail account apparently from Pistonheads, saying:

Dear RichardHMorris6643,

Thanks for registering with PistonHeads. Please confirm your registration by following this link...

etc.

I didn't follow that link.

I then received another email with the same time stamp and a title:
"Welcome to PistonHeads RichardHMorris6643. Welcome home."

What's occurring?

[jeremyc]

I suspect it's a phishing scam email.

What was the sender's email address?

[RichardHMorris]

accounts at piston heads dot com.

[jeremyc]

Have you recently created an advert in the classifieds?

[RichardHMorris]

Nope.

[Ben Lowden]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Please forward the emails to [e-mail] so we can investigate.

[RichardHMorris]

Ben Lowden said:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Please forward the emails to [e-mail] so we can investigate.

Done!

[Ben Lowden]

Replied but to confirm here, it was a genuine PistonHeads email. Your email address on your account is unverified, so the email would have been triggered for you to verify your email address.

[RichardHMorris]

Cheers Ben.

Just to confirm, I didn't set up this bogus account or verify the email via the link.

[RichardHMorris]

Another bogus account set up yesterday, this time to a prehistoric AOL account of mine:
RichardHMorris3523323

What's going on?

[Ben Lowden]

Hi Richard, this does seem very odd. Are you experiencing this with any other websites, or just on PistonHeads?

[RichardHMorris]

Just PH and just very recently.

[Ben Lowden]

I have asked the team to investigate this. We have not had any data leaks or been hacked, so it must be your email addresses that are compromised I'm afraid. We recommend changing your passwords on your email accounts if you haven't done so already.