I got an email last week from CVS with coupons but it was sent to under my mom's name. I don't know how this is possible. She doesn't know that email, she doesn't go to CVS, and no one signed up with that email. She doesn't even have an email. How is it possible that I got this email under my mom's name? It even has a membership number.
Something like that happened before with Kmart. Everytime my sister made purchases, her account was tied to my email.
That is really weird. I don't use that email. It is a junk email. I used it a long time ago to sign up for offers to get free stuff but i always used fake information for it. I do not know how it was tied to Kmart or how my sister used the email.
I rather imagine that it has been sold on to other, third, parties - lists of emails addresses of genuine people (even if conceived by the recipient as a 'fake' email address) are very valuable, precisely because the information concerns a real, live person.
Furthermore, I would also imagine that some of these companies have nice, big, data bases, and, if they are intelligent - and some of them are - they may cross reference whatever information they have and draw conclusions from it.
This is why whenever I sign up for anything - either in a hard copy, or online - I will invariably spend a few minutes peering closely - irrespective of how long it takes, or the size of the queue building behind me, or the impatient sighs of the person manning the desk - for the microscopic and minuscule and quite invisibly tiny box that they are obliged by law to include on any such form.
You know it. It is the one that is almost invisible and thus hard to find, a teeny little box, surrounded by print in a font that is sufficiently small in size to rank as a challenge to read.
This is the one that needs to be found and ticked in order 1) not to receive future emails or marketing or information concerning 'special offers' from them; and 2) not to allow them to pass on your details to third parties 'for marketing purposes', and I then tick it, quite clearly.
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Most likely, one of the places you got free stuff from sold your email address + street address to a data service. CVS sent a request to the data service for email addresses tied to the physical address and got yours. There are mailing list companies that collect email addresses and tons of demographic information about people to sell to marketers.
Exactly.
