Tik Tok email hijack?

[Stan Calow]

I have an email account which is getting email via Tik Tok. I do not have Tik Tok on any device. Multiple emails a day referring to people I am following or should follow, etc. I changed the email password, and it's still coming. I dont know how TikTok works. Is this a phishing thing, soliciting by Tik Tok, or does it indicate someone has hacked my email account? Either way, I will close the account if necessary but wondering if this is a common thing. Google searches have not been helpful. Anyone have experience?

[Monte Milanuk]

Just mark the messages as spam, and let the email client software do its thing.

[Jim Becker]

Someone likely mistyped an email address into their TikTok registration (inadvertently or on purpose) and it happens to be your email address. Do what Monte mentioned to make the emails go away. Don't click on anything in them.

[Mike Chance in Iowa]

I would try logging on to tiktok.com using your email address and a random password. See if it tells you your password is incorrect, or if you don't have a valid user name. A few years ago I started receiving emails that I believed to be spam from twitter. I don't use twitter. After so many of them started showing up, on a whim I tried logging on to twitter with my email account and it told me my password was incorrect. When I did a password reset, sure enough, I received a password reset notification in my email. I then logged in to "my" twitter account and while it didn't have my name anywhere, it was created in a country that does not regard United States very highly. I was able to delete "my" account from twitter.

[Stan Calow]

Thanks folks. I was reluctant to interact with TikTok since I don't have or want an account, but these were good suggestion. If they were just solicitations to join I could have ignored, but they looked very much like real people trying to engage.

[Bill George]

I have an email account which is getting email via Tik Tok. I do not have Tik Tok on any device. Multiple emails a day referring to people I am following or should follow, etc. I changed the email password, and it's still coming. I dont know how TikTok works. Is this a phishing thing, soliciting by Tik Tok, or does it indicate someone has hacked my email account? Either way, I will close the account if necessary but wondering if this is a common thing. Google searches have not been helpful. Anyone have experience?

So you have a Tik Tok email account or just getting emails from one? Your email address is out and available to anyone who had received one from you or a business or whatever. The only way you can stop getting those from Tik Tok is to block that address or domain.

[Stan Calow]

Bill I have no TikTok account of any kind. I am getting email notifications on my regular gmail account via TikTok. My concern is that someone had used my email address to sign up for TikTok. If they can do that, what else can they use it for?

[Bill Howatt]

Can you clarify what you mean by, "via TikTok"?
Are you getting emails from addresses like Fred@TikTok.com or ....?
I haven't got a clue about how TikTok signup or internals work but usually these days if you sign up for a site using your email address they send you a confirm or activation message for the new account to that email address for you to acknowledge to create the account. You would have received that email. Now, some clever hacker may get around this but an accidental typo wouldn't.

[Bill George]

Bill I have no TikTok account of any kind. I am getting email notifications on my regular gmail account via TikTok. My concern is that someone had used my email address to sign up for TikTok. If they can do that, what else can they use it for?

To send an email from your account they would have needed your email password otherwise don't worry about it, just spam block it and move on.

[Bill Howatt]

When you have email concerns the first thing is to change your email password - just in case, if nothing else.

[Lee DeRaud]

Bill I have no TikTok account of any kind. I am getting email notifications on my regular gmail account via TikTok. My concern is that someone had used my email address to sign up for TikTok. If they can do that, what else can they use it for?
It would have to be something that doesn't require you to verify your email address by sending email from it. Off the top of my head, that's a very short list, and I'd be surprised if opening a TikTok account is one of them.

More likely it's a phishing scam of the same form as "Your Netflix/MacAfee/whatever account is expired/locked/whatever", with a (fake) link for you to log in and resolve the 'issue'. And very likely the email never saw the inside of a TikTok server, they just made it up to look that way. The goal is to get TikTok account info. You don't have a TikTok account, but some percentage of the people who receive the email do, and some percentage of them will fall for it.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Probably a virus.
(I saw this type of thing a lot when I worked in IT)

Don't panic though, it's not on your end.
Someone with a virus has your email address in their contact list.

Just move them to the spam folder. Don't open any of them since they may be carrying the malware.

[Stan Calow]

Thanks everyone. I changed password and haven't seen a message since.