Comment by reaperducer
7 hours ago
I saw a new marketing strategy recently: Someone tried to sign into something with my email. I didn't have an account, so they took the excuse to send me an email asking me to create an account.
This has been going on since at least 2006.
Startups will "growth hack" by buying e-mail lists and feeding them into their password recovery tools.
A certain percentage of people will then follow the links and end up creating a new account on a service they had no interest in that now has their confirmed contact information, a new user, and a plausible reason to bombard them with marketing email.
I recently started getting emails from a company warning me that "I only had x days left to verify your account."
The account was supposedly registered for an organization whose name was somewhat similar to mine, so I thought somebody fat-fingered their coworker's email (the initial email was an invitation to create an account and join the org), but it might have very well been the tactic you described.