September 30, 2024 at 9:50 pm

He Started Receiving A Gambler’s E-mails By Mistake, And When Alerted He Was Rude About It. So He Contacted His Wife And They Got Divorced.

by Mila Cardozo

Often, people who are doing something wrong or even illegal will get upset when someone calls them out.

In this case, a gambler got mad when someone found out what he was doing.

But he wasn’t expecting to pay his dues so soon.

Let’s see what happened.

You’re mad at me over your gambling problem?

Background: About 25 years ago, I registered my last name dot com for my personal use. I mostly use it as an email server for my family.

Unfortunately, there are many businesses around the world that use my last name dot their country code for their websites and email. As such, I regularly get business email sent to my server.

Sounds pretty harmless so far. Let’s see…

Most of the time, this just bounces, but sometimes they happen to match the name of a user or former user of my mail server.

As all of the companies have been polite so far, I routinely forward business-related email to the correct addresses. (Because it doesn’t really cost me anything, I have set up personal email addresses for some people I don’t actually know who happened to have my last name, as long as they agree to not use it for spam.)

Twenty years ago, there was this one guy who happened to have the same first name as my deceased uncle. I was monitoring that address, just in case anything important legally or financially came through, to make sure that his family didn’t get surprised by anything.

The guy who decided to use that for his address had a serious gambling problem.

Uh-oh… Things are about to get serious.

I was getting emails from several gambling sites, often multiple times per day, with transaction records for large (at least from my perspective) deposits. These were all credit card transactions, very often for offshore online casinos, so they didn’t exactly abide by banking regulations, either in the USA or his home country.

In other words, I often got the full credit card numbers and expiration dates emailed unencrypted. (If I had been dishonest, I could have easily run up thousands of dollars in charges.)

Because some of these transactions also had his physical address, I did have a way to contact him.

Almost like a spy! Good thing this person is honest.

First, by using that, I was able to figure out what his actual personal email address was (I did not want to use his company email because of the nature of what I was sending), so I emailed him and explained the problem, and asked him if he was really comfortable with me having access to several of his credit cards.

He accused me of being a hacker, called me several names that I shouldn’t repeat here, and blew me off, because I kept getting the email receipts.

At this point, I figured out that he was probably digging himself and his family into a fairly deep financial hole, and, while I was annoyed with him for ignoring his problem and being rude, I didn’t think that his family should pay the price for his bad gambling habit.

Wow. I applaud this person.

Because I had his home address, I was able to figure out his wife’s name and where she worked.

I printed up a stack of about 20 of the emails, put them into an envelope marked “Personal and Confidential,” and dropped them in the mail to her office.

A couple of weeks later, the gambling emails stopped. A few months after that, out of curiosity, I did a search for them again and found the legal notice for their divorce.

Oops.

A spy dedicated to the common good.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A commenter shares their opinion.