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Is Bioware selling/leaking email addresses?

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HackedGirl

Have you checked your spam folder recently? Let me guess you’ve won four lotteries need to help 3 members of royalty move around some money and have a fantastic job offering in an industry you don’t work in.

Yeah the world of spam is pretty annoying and generic but where do these people get these addresses from in the first place? If you had said Bioware then it’s likely you would have been laughed off the Internet but what if you were right?

A reddit user by the name of rollie82, has an interesting email strategy. He owns his own domain and so whenever he needs to provide an email address to a company he uses one that can easily be traced back just in case it gets sold.

So 2 years ago he signed up for Dragon Age with Bioware with the email address dragonage@mydomain.net (obviously not his real domain) and then today he received the following email

Email

An official Bioware community rep has posted on his reddit thread that Bioware do not sell email addresses and do not have any security issues. She then went on to claim it may have been a virus on his computer which is a pretty poor showing after reading his story.

Hey guys. I just noticed this thread, and I wanted to pop in and lay any rumors to rest. If you aren’t aware, I’m the BioWare Community Manager (did a fun AMA here last week!).

At BioWare we take privacy very seriously. When creating a new EA account, users are always able to opt-out of marketing communications and we never sell your information to any partners. Judging by the nature of this email I would run a virus scan to ensure your computer is secure.

Feel free to tweet me @jessicamerizan if you ever encounter any problems. I will absolutely do my best to answer any concerns you have 🙂

I should go.

Now in my opinion if Bioware were really selling his email info the spam would be of a higher quality so this looks like someone has received the email address either after a hack attack or some underpaid intern decided to get one over on his employers.

Either way the idea of customising an email address per company is actually quite a solid idea and seeing that I have a pile of domains on hand I should maybe give it a try.

A more common way of testing this for yourself is to either use the + or . hacks or if you have the option to put in your name then change your surname to reflect the company so I would become Gavin Bioware when buying a Bioware game.

So do you think Bioware has been hacked or is our reddit user just looking for attention?

Last Updated: February 29, 2012

One Comment

  1. myemail+lazygamer

    November 17, 2014 at 16:33

    Does this work for Facebook, or other established online accounts (livejournal, myspace)?

    What downfalls about this hack exist? How will spammers start to game “plus addressing”?

    Reply

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