How to Deal With Password Reset Harassment

Understand that changing your email address isn't as bad as it may seem. While you might think that this means that you'll have to receive emails in a different account, this is not the case. Most email services allow you to create aliases, which are email addresses that are linked to your main email account. Any emails that are sent to your alias will come to your main inbox. The person harassing you would not know the alias, so they would not be able to abuse the password reset feature anymore.

• Keep in mind that this method may not help you if they are abusing the password reset feature on your email account itself. In this case, it's better to contact the email service's support instead.

Create an alias. Every email service has a different process for creating an alias. For instructions on how to create them, you can read the articles linked below:

• To create a Gmail alias, go here.
• To create an Outlook.com or Hotmail alias, go here.
• To create a Yahoo alias, go here.
• For other email services, you can search the internet or help section for information. You can also look through the account settings to find the appropriate setting.

Change the email address on your accounts. Again, every account is different, but the idea is the same. The password reset requires that you know the email address associated with the account. So if the email is changed, then the person harassing you would not be able to request password resets anymore. Below are links to articles with instructions for popular services:

• For Amazon, go here.
• For Facebook, go here.
• For Instagram, go here for Android, or here for iOS.
• For Twitter, go here for Android, or here for iOS.
• For iCloud, go here.
• For other services, you can search the internet or help section for information. You can also look through the account settings to find the appropriate setting.

Change your username if needed. If the password reset function uses your username instead of email, then you may have to change your username to stop the abuse. However, changing your username may allow the abuser to grab it and use it to impersonate you. This may be their ultimate goal. So in this case, it's better to contact support instead.

Decide if you want to contact support. Support might take a while to get back to you, but they have special tools at their disposal. They can block the IP address making the password reset requests, and there may be other things that they can do. However, since this kind of abuse is unusual, support might not know how to respond effectively. You may want to try to use aliases first, and then contact support only if they don't work.

Find out how to contact support. A contact link is typically located near the bottom of the home page, or it may be in account settings. You can also search for an "about" link on the website, as some sites list contact info there.

• Don't search for contact information on search engines. Scammers typically impersonate other services and can get ranked high in search results, so it's best to only look on the website instead.
• Keep in mind that Google and Facebook do not have a support team that you can contact, so you have to use an alias for Facebook. Google's password reset feature is harder to abuse though, so it might not be an issue

Tell a teacher or your parents if you are a kid. Your teachers or parents will be able to find out who is doing this (if you don't know already), and get them to stop.

Contact the police if it gets serious. Requesting password reset emails are not serious enough to contact the police on its own, but if whoever is doing it is also doing other things, such as stalking or threatening violence, then you should contact the police immediately.

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