Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

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I can tell you, from personal experience, that the vast majority of sites still don't bother to send a Confirmation Email before allowing you to create an account.

I have a gmail address that I secured back in 2004 which is fairly short in length. Multiple people other than myself have used that email to sign up for all sorts of things which never bothered to confirm that the user actually owned the account before happily signing them up. AWS accounts, hotel sites, innumerable soccer and fantasy-football related sites, etc.

Every time I would try to reach out to the service to tell them that I had never signed up for an account as the email holder, they would give me the same non-answer: "Well if you own the email account, just reset your password and then delete it!" Nope. Not doing that. It was their negligence that allowed the account to be created under my email in the first place. I am not going to acknowledge ownership of the account to cover their fuck-up.

This happens to me frequently, I have an OG gmail account which a bunch of people have associated with their own accounts. The problem is the provider will verify a phone number, and once that's validated, will accept an email address, even if it's wrong. Two financial entities have accepted my email address tied to other people's account: Chime, and Venmo. There's no way to fix this since they all presume I am a customer of theirs, so the path to fix is to do it in their app. It is incredibly frustrating, more so when it's people who handles money do it. They should know better! The "We are not a bank (therefore not covered by banking regulations)" does so much work to cover their shoddy practices.

Same story with Gmail here, and unfortunately over the years it has simply become my primary. I'm still undecided on how I want to handle my own domain+email.

Someone opened a Venmo account using my gmail and immediately started moving thousands of dollars in small transactions, and my only options were to a) take ownership of the thousands of dollars of small transactions that were now associated with my unverified email or b) get my email banned???? Eventually I got an email saying the Venmo was disabled due to suspicious activity, hope that doesn't bite me in the ass in the future.

What if I wanted to sign up for Venmo in the future? Why do I need to create another email address to use their product in the future when they didn't even verify it in the first place? How are they allowed to run their billon dollar business like this?

I'm the recovery account to at least two accounts of real people with the same name (the people are real, despite the uncommon name). Don't bother reporting it via the link in the mails, it does nothing. I'm not even sure this isn't some Google shenanigans either.

Want to hear a fun one? You can get realtors to spam any (US) phone number you want by entering it into Zillow for like a rental or something. They do no verification whatsoever.

THIS! THIS! THIS!

I cannot believe that in 2026 companies can get away with not confirming your email address. So damn annoying…and apparently something that can get YOU into legal jeopardy. Could we use this case as class-action precedent to sue a few large companies and get them to change?

Make sure to report the emails as spam. They might actually wake up once their marketing slop stops being delivered to gmail inboxes.

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