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Whilst going through my spam folder on Gmail I've found 2 emails that struck me as suspicious. The first is simply a welcome message from DropBox saying 'Hi Ahmed please verify your email' and then next is confirming that the email had been verified. The problem is my name isn't Ahmed and I've never signed up with DropBox before.

What I don't understand though is that, from the looks of it, nobody has actually accessed my email account. The emails themselves were unread, my list of devices accessing my account are just mine and also in the activity log the only activity there is mine and nobody accessed or even tried to access my email at the time this verification email was received from DropBox.

Can anyone shed some light on what's going on here? If this is some sort of elaborate hack then why? Couldn't they just sign in with a fake email address that can be set up in seconds rather than using mine? I'll just also add my email address is a very specific set of letters and numbers and find it highly unlikely it's been accidentally used. The emails from DropBox are also genuine as I've verified this. How could someone use my email address to verify their account with DropBox without ever logging in to my email account?

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  • I get this sort of thing 3 or 4 times a year on my gmail account. Not always via Dropbox.
    – Chenmunka
    Commented Feb 1, 2023 at 9:46
  • If I were you I'd contact them via dropbox.com/report_abuse and reported everything.
    – Artem S. Tashkinov
    Commented Feb 1, 2023 at 12:17
  • anyone could put any email address into a registration form, or fake/spoof the origin of the email. I don't see how this implies access to your account(s) at all. It's just a drive-by spam imho...
    – dandavis
    Commented Feb 2, 2023 at 23:11
  • Thanks for the responses. I've messaged dropbox a few times now but for some reason the account still exists. I'm still receiving promotional emails from them addressed to this 'Ahmed'. I'm pretty sure this guy never accessed my email account so I have no idea what's happened here. My only concern now really is what they're using this dropbox account for using my email address.
    – user288766
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 11:00

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My guess is that the emails are not actually from Dropbox. Google usually does not send genuine Dropbox emails to spam so I guess they noticed that the email was sent by an unauthorized server and spammed it.

Especially the second email confirming the email verification should trick you to "click here if you think something is wrong with this" (or something similar), leading to some page looking just like Dropbox.

That page would than ask you to login and voila, you have both delivered your Dropbox credentials to a bad guy and confirmed that the Gmail email address is actually used.

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  • Hi thanks for your response. It was definitely a real email. I went through to motions of signing up for a DropBox account shortly after to see if it would let me and it did. I then got the exact same email for verifying email address which came through from the same address and was grouped with the one sent to 'Ahmed'. To this day I'm also still receiving the odd promotional message from DropBox addressed to 'Ahmed' so some way or some how they managed to verify my email address without ever having to actually log in to my email account. I've messaged dropbox repeatedly to let them know this.
    – user288766
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 10:58
  • @user288766 I still uphold my original thought. If you only looked at the email in your email client / webmail it will look identical. Were the actual link targets identical, not just the displayed texts? And look at the email headers to see which server it actually came from. Bottom line, if within the original email chain there was an email verification confirmation and you never did it, then the email was either not legit or somebody else did it with your account but was too stupid to remove the incriminating emails. Which of them is more likely depends on your password hygiene / reuse.
    – fleitner
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 14:41
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This doesn't sound as if someone has hacked your email account. It may be possible someone entered the wrong email address when they had signed up for a DropBox account and accidentally entered your email address instead. As they would be unable to confirm the DropBox account they won't be able to activate or use the account.

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    then next is confirming that the email had been verified - no way on earth someone could have verified an email address which doesn't belong to them.
    – Artem S. Tashkinov
    Commented Feb 1, 2023 at 12:15

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