When a recycled email address could come back to haunt you ...

I got a strange call from my mother yesterday informing me that facebook had set up an account for her with someone elses information on it. says me.

After a few minutes questioning her on exactly what happened I figured out what was going on.

She decided to create a second facebook account to play some games right from the start as she has reached highest levels etc (I'm fairly sure she could have just deleted the game(s) and then joined it again but that's a different story. Hell she could have wanted a private account for any number of illicit reasons I'm not going to dwell on )

In order to do this she needed a new email address so went and signed up for a hotmail address (via the new outlook site) which was her maiden name. I was surprised she could do this without putting in name1234 etc as the name would be common enough. But she did and it gave her the email address.

Back to facebook she goes and tries to create an account at which point it says that its already created and to click here for the password etc. She didn't realise at the time she was clicking through a forgotten password routine. Facebook emails here the password / she resets the current one and voila her "new" account is accessible.

The account though had 300+ friends on it, personal information and loads of photos (some as she put it racy which she was appalled at ) as well as message and user history etc of the actual owner of the account who hadn't updated the account since 2011.

Basically someone with her maiden name at one point opened a hotmail account, signed up to facebook and then stopped using the hotmail account / and or facebook account. Hotmail it turns out recycle old email addresses and she was given that email address. Thankfully she wasn't the sort to abuse this knowledge but it is a scary thought.

So the moral of this TLDR story is this - if you have used free email addresses from hotmail, gmail etc in the past that were used to sign up for services where personal info was entered or stored you better make sure that you keep using that address.

Now in true after hours style - let's play with the hypotheticals of having access to someone elses email account. What's the worst you could do with the information ? (not that you would of course !!!)