Someone in Norway has the same name as me, and they made a PayPal account. They accidentally used my email during signup and I got some weird emails in Norwegian. So I called PayPal. I asked them to change the email. “You can’t, because it’s not your account, you just admitted”. Uh, ok. Can you close the account? “It’s not your account”. Can you contact the account owner and tell them to fix it? “We don’t have their email”. Can I use account recovery and close it? “Then you would be breaking into someone else’s account”.

So what should I do? PayPal put a notice on the account in case they log in, and told me to just ignore the emails. I was baffled, but there really isn’t anything I can do. I tried account recovery anyway, but it didn’t work. They never logged in, I think. They probably made another account with the correct details and never thought about this one.

So I’ve been getting the “our terms and conditions have changed” email once or twice a year and ignoring them. They’re still in Norwegian. I just looked it up, this has been going on since 2015. Maybe I should contact PayPal again and tell them how ridiculous they’ve been.

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