I’ve been sent a contract for a house in Virginia I haven’t bought and been mistaken for a Paraguayan engineer. Is it too much to ask for my email back?

For the past five years, I’ve been engaged in a very strange relationship, with an unknown number of people all around the world, which opens up the most intimate details of their personal lives to me. I’ve also deleted a child’s reading history, and nicked someone’s music streaming account. But I’m the victim, here: I’ve fallen prey to reverseidentity theft.

My first name is fairly common worldwide. It exists in different forms depending on your gender and location, from Alexis to Alejandro, but almost always gets shortened to Alex.

My surname is much less common, particularly spelled without superfluous “a”s or “e”s. But what is hugely common is the Hispanic surname Hernandez, which gets shortened to Hern if you’re trying to lop a few characters off the email address.

That means that my email address, alexhern@[major webmail provider], often gets the wayward missives intended for Herns and Hernandezes across the world. To make matters worse, full-stops in email addresses are ignored by a lot of webmail providers, meaning alex.hern, and even a.l.e.x.h.e.r.n will also end up in my inbox.

As a result, in the past few years, I have been sent:

A distance-learning prospectus for California’s Ashford University by an admissions counselor who thought I was “Alexsis”.



A request for a professional reference by somebody called Amber, who thought I was her boss Alex Hernedez.

The price list for a bulk order of Build-a-Bear Workshop teddy bears (it’s $10 a bear, with a discount of 20-40% the more you order, in case you’re curious).

Build-a-bear workshop. Photograph: Private Email

Thanks for touring a gated community in Colorado with an interest to buy a house by a realtor named Tara who thought I was her client Alexandra.

A signed and completed contract for a house in Hampton, Virginia by another realtor – the contract was complete with a scan of a cheque, and the complete personal information of an Alexander Hernandez.

A spanish-language presentation on the taxonomy of species by a biology student at Chihuahua University in Mexico.

A schedule for a three-hour acting lesson by a Hollywood-based actor training company.

The syllabus for the Salvadoran Vocational Training Institute, where an Alex Hern was taking English lessons (the email was in Spanish).

A confirmation of a house sale in Bogota, Colombia.

A pension programme for Americans turning 65.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buying a house in Colorado. Photograph: Private Email

Pagan polygamists, prayer circles and golf invitations – the joy of emails meant for someone else Read more

And a request for a prescription of beta-blockers from an elderly couple in Arizona.

At least one of those emails came not from someone who had forgotten their own email address, but from someone who had copied down “alex.hernz” wrongly. So for a while, I was left with the hope that the world wasn’t full of people who forget their own email address on a regular basis.

And then I started being signed up to services. If you don’t pay attention, you probably think that most websites have some sort of email verification, preventing you from making a mistake and being locked out of your account. I thought that as well. It’s not true.



In the past year or so alone, I have been signed up to:

File sharing service 4Shared.

Mexican dating app Twoo.

LA Fitness gyms.

Kik Messenger.

US mobile network Sprint.

Kik Messenger, again.

The Mexican version of Spotify.

So I’m now signed up to the Mexican Spotify, ¡Feliz Premium!, among other random websites. Photograph: Email from Spotify

Facebook.



Children’s reading tracker Epic.

The Jay-Z-backed music streaming service Tidal.

Having a common name isn’t all bad, however. When I wrote about GamerGate early this year, and the practice of a related group based around the Baphomet image board of sending SWAT teams to opponents’ homes, an attempt to “dox” me fell mercifully short. Doxing – collecting and publishing personal information about someone in an attempt to intimidate or out them – can ruin lives.

But in my case, I have thousands of people accidentally providing cover for my personal information. Which is how I ended up being doxed as Paraguayan engineer – apparently the lucky person to have grabbed the Facebook short URL alex.hern.

Despite the positives, I’ve spent the best part of a year trying to ignore these emails, deleting them as they come in, and unsubscribing when I remembered to. But the one-two punch of Facebook and Epic broke me: the quantity of updates was never-ending, and I couldn’t unsubscribe from everything with one click. On top of that, I was still receiving emails from LA Fitness and Sprint, which don’t actually offer any ability to unsubscribe at all.

So I logged in myself.

The problem with using someone else’s email to sign up to web services is that, well, your email address is the final arbiter of identity online. In a very practical sense, if you sign up for an account with my email, I control it, not you. And with a single click on the “forgotten password”, I can consolidate that control.

Unfortunately, once I’ve logged in – just to disable email notifications – there’s no way to hand control back. After all, I don’t know the original password, and I can’t exactly get in touch with the account holder. What am I going to do, email them?

I feel bad. Of course I feel bad. The kid of one Alex Hern was halfway through the Adventure Time comic, and dutifully recording their progress as they went. Another (or maybe the same?) Alex Hern had signed up for a Tidal account but apparently not logged in once, because they – by which I mean me – kept getting reminder emails. Incessantly.

But hopefully some good will come of this. As the websites blink out for Alex Herns across the world, maybe they’ll finally realise that I’m the one with the email address. And then they’ll go and register with their own bloody emails.

Are you an Ale(xander/xis/xei/xandra/jandro/ssandro) Hern(andez/ez/e) who has stolen my email address? Or have you had a similar experience? Leave a comment below - or email somebody who isn’t me.