Photobucket hacked and my bogus account

Cyber Crimes Abound

On May 8, 2015 the FBI arrested two men for hacking members’ accounts at Photobucket in 2014 and selling personal details and content from them. The Denver Post has the scoop.

All of which has nothing to do with the Photobucket problem I’ve been trying to ignore for months now. Today I took time to investigate.

You see, though I’ve never set up an account with Photobucket, my gmail account began receiving newsletters and ‘special offer’ emails from the popular online photo-sharing site under the name “Haydee O”. This sparked other businesses to send me similar unwanted emails, quite a deluge of them as you may imagine. And all the companies’s messages seemed to be generating from Australia and perhaps Photobucket owns them or sold my details to them.

But I was tired of deleting them all so I used the Sign In tab provided in today’s bogus Photobucket gmail to sign in to “my” Photobucket account (once my alleged password had been sent to me because I ‘forgot’ it.) Upon finding the set-up page of the account I discovered the name “Haydee O. Urbina” had been used with little personal info added to the registration form other than ‘Australian Territory’ and MY gmail address (which is easy to find on my blogs.)

Naturally as I edited the form I unsubscribed from the newsletter which I hope cuts down on the constant spamming. Then a search for “Haydee O Urbina” turned up women of various ages who sport that name (though the middle initial was not always ‘O’) yet none seemed to be associated with Australia.

Haydee O Urbina, You Have a Message (you stinker you)

So, Photobucket’s “Haydee O Urbina”, if that’s your real name, I wish you well and hope you have better things to do in the future than to set up online accounts using other people’s email addresses. You could have selected “no newsletters” but you didn’t–thanks for nothing.

In parting, I must say that besides gaining whatever you may have gained from lying on your account form, you really know how to cause others to waste way too much of their time correcting your foolish deceit!