Unfiltered Story #213631

This story begins in August 2017 when I receive several emails I think are just spam from sites I have allegedly “subscribed” to. After a couple of weeks, I find out that it isn’t spam but someone else using my email address for pretty much all their online activities—including as backup for their own address which means that I could kick them out of their account if I wanted to. I also find said own email address and write them an email, asking them to please stop using my address because the sudden influx of junkmail is really getting on my nerves, and it should be in their own best interest to not give a person they don’t know that much power over their email account.
I receive no reply (except for one email in which this person apparently tries to forward my mail to someone else and fails).

Instead, I get an order confirmation for some clothes with pretty much ALL their personal data; address, phone number, full name, date of birth, just everything short of their banking information. This is also when I first discover that their name is very close to mine. Think “Katrina” vs. “Katrine” with the exact same last name. I try contacting her via WhatsApp, but again, no reply. One day later, I have a confirmation for a doctor’s appointment in my mail with even more sensitive data.

At this point, I have already been on the phone for close to a week with one of the companies that won’t stop sending me emails via her account – their customer service is the absolute worst – and I’m about to go ballistic. I have social anxiety (especially when it comes to phone calls with strangers) which sometimes prevents me from doing basic things like making appointments or ordering food, but my anger over this whole thing just blew right past it. After all, I still can’t be one hundred percent sure that it’s only my email address she is using and that she is not doing something with it that could somehow be traced back to me.
I still have this other email address from the failed forwarding attempt and I use it to write to this other person, asking them to please just talk to my almost-namesake and tell her to stop using an email address that isn’t even hers. I’m not even sure how she herself doesn’t notice that she can’t access my account and why she obviously doesn’t care.

I finally, FINALLY get a reply, thanking me for bringing this to their attention and telling me that they will look into it and sit down with my almost-namesake. I hope that is the last of it and that it’s finally over which seems to be true because I don’t receive anything else.

Fast forward to February 2018 and I get another suspicious email, but I try to brush it off as simple spam. Except that today, I get another order confirmation, this time from Amazon where this person apparently used my email address AGAIN for her account. And then another one. So not only does she apparently understand pretty much anything you need to know about the internet EXCEPT for “What is an email address and how do I use it?” but she also seems to forget this very, very easy thing just a few months after it was last explained to her.