Do you guys remember when a few years ago Yahoo decided to make old, stale accounts up for grabs again? I lost my old Yahoo account which was forwarding mail to my main Google account. I haven't logged into it in ages. I could never re-register it or reset access to it after Yahoo killed it. And luckily i was able to move everything away from it, BUT it still forwards me mail. At some point I remember getting something that indicated that somebody's using it. I still can't believe this bonehead move on Yahoo's part.
I am from a place where information security awareness is in general very low. So while people fill bank forms and all they don't usually give much care and often fill wrong mobile numbers and many times fill wrong emails or just <their first name>@some-email.com just because there's a field called "email" on the form. The agents (who are almost never bank employees and usually third party hires) also add it to "sir, don't worry, you sign here and here and I will do the rest".
So yeah, my [email protected]/yahoo.com regularly gets: 3 bank statements, 2 credit card bills, 1 postpaid Internet and mobile connection bill, and password recovery mails from other Internet accounts, my mobile number gets OTPs for heaven's sake. I received a Facebook password reset mails.
Initially I would try to contact the bank/company and they couldn't care less. In fact people themselves didn't give two hoots - none of them (I was able to contact one guy on Facebook using the mobile number in mail). So I've created filters to delete them upon receipt.
What surprises me is even newsgroups verify email and some online services verify mobile too but banks never do. It's so crucial but banks never verify mobile numbers and emails, at least not here in India.
