Someone took my email address. Need to fix.

[2bits]

Hi all,

I have an email address that is easy to guess, so very often random people on the internet enter it into webforms as a bogus address (bogus to them, but it's my real address). It's a common 5 letter word at a common domain, thus the issue.

Several years ago when I created this email address, I tried to register it with Paypal. Turns out someone else already tried to fraudulently create a Paypal.de (German Paypal) account with that address. Of course they couldn't finish the process because they couldn't receive email at that address. You might think that after a certain number of weeks or months, this account creation might be cancelled, and I can get my email address back. But NO, it's been several years now, and Paypal.de is still waiting on the account owner to login and complete the process. I've tried to recover the password of the account and kill it myself, but in addition to the password I also need to answer a security question. No dice.

I tried to fix this several years ago when I discovered the issue, but the customer service reps were initially unable to comprehend the problem and then unwilling to fix it. I'm back for round 2.... How should I proceed with this? Thanks for the advice!

[leonbloy]

I'm having a similar problem.  I tried to joined paypal.com today, the system told my email was already registered. I assumed I had already signed-up some time ago, and forgotten, so I asked for a password reset. It worked, I could login... but it was another person, other name, address, country...

To begin with, I can't understand how paypal allows to create an account with an unverified email (I'm positive that my email was never used by other person) 

Anyway, I tried to turn this into "my" account by changing the name, and other data from the profile... but I cannot do that without sending faxes/documentation that "prove that my name has changed" (!!!). 

Then, I looked into the transaction history of this person, and to my surprise (I would have bet that it was empty), he has a payment on Dec, 2009. Surprised (a little unsettled).

What can I do? Should I close the account? (and pray that paypal let me open another one with that email address?)