from Hacker News

How did they link a domain I own to my gmail email addres?

by CHsurfer on 4/3/14, 6:48 PM with 6 comments

I just received an email from findsway.com: <i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i> Hi Jonathan Someone at Picutive has a crush on you !<p>Your admirer and 3 of your Facebook friends are using Sway to anonymously meet new people.<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i> Picutive.com is my domain (it's not very popular). I have the only email address associated at that domain, so it's obviously a scam, but how did they link Picutive to my email address?

  • by andretti1977 on 4/3/14, 8:54 PM

    Findsway is gathering infos from linkedin: i know it because i set a very specific company name in my profile (no one else uses that name) as i am a single freelance so that company has no employee except me!!!

    They write in their email that someone at my company loves me and that other 3 facebook friends of mine are interested in me...but i don't own a facebook account!

    They are spamming a lot and i didn't post an article on my blog because i don't want to make publicity or advertisement in any way for them.

    That's a very bad way to promote their apps: i would have preferred them to take my address from linkedin and say "well, why don't you try our app?"

  • by donretag on 4/3/14, 7:11 PM

    I received the same email. I am assuming what is happening is that someone downloaded their app and connected it to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has your current job and email, so they used this information to spam you. Do you have Picutive.com as one of your jobs on LinkedIn? My theory at least.

  • by badrah on 4/7/14, 6:33 PM

    Yeah .. Same here .. I got a similar one few days ago. The funny thing is that the link in the email is broken and responding with "bad request". Wait! .. Or may be I've just confirmed an active email address in their db .. I shouldn't fall for that! :)

  • by nandhp on 4/3/14, 6:59 PM

    The WHOIS database publishes the name, address, phone number, fax number, and email address for owners of domain names.

    http://www.domain.com/whois/whois.bml

  • by mrt0mat0 on 4/3/14, 6:56 PM

    it's not jonmedding@gmail.com is it?