Someone lost his orkut account to me

Should I say someone lost his account to me or should I say someone tried to impersonate me? I don’t know. I created a new ymail account some time back and I don’t check that email frequently. One evening I checked that account and to my surprise, a mail from orkut was in my inbox asking to verify email address of the google account. Some one created an orkut account with my email address.

I was eager to know if the person was trying to impersonate me (WT*! I’m not a celebrity) or he was lazy to create an email account or it was a typo. I just confirmed clicking on the link in the mail and end of the story. The email is verified for the orkut (google) account. And the next thing, I want to log onto orkut and see if the person was trying to impersonate (rare chance). And now I need the password of the account, which obviously is an easy task. Just went to the forgot password link and the nice guys (software) at google sent me a reset password link just after verifying a captcha. This shows how sucky our current password recovery mechanisms are. Gotcha! I got the new password and the account is mine now. Logged on to the orkut account and saw the profile information. WT*! The guy has his complete postal address, phone numbers etc. on his profile.

How can people just make such stupid mistakes? It was a nice week’s time since the creation of the account. So, next time you are creating any account and your email address is your user name, be careful, don’t do such stupid mistakes. This could have been worse if google actually sends the password instead of the reset link. Most people would have same password for multiple accounts. And if I can find the person’s other email address or any other account with the same password, then it’s a complete mess of his online presence.

Had I waited with out resetting the password for some time, that would have been worse. The guy would have used the account and built his network, after which I can take control of it. Now I’m going to call him on his mobile and tell him this!