Suspicious Email from the "thetrainline"

[ausrom]

I recently received an email from "thetrainline" addressed to my email regarding confirmation of two tickets bought to travel that morning to Nottingham from London St Pancras for an amount of 124.00 pounds. I wrote an email immediately to "thetrainline" informing them that a) I was currently in Rome, Italy, b) I hadn't purchased any tickets and c) the credit card details did not match me. They replied that the purchaser must have made a mistake in the email, even though the email is correct and that the customer would obviously contact them because they needed the confirmation code to collect the tickets.
Again today I received another email from "thetrainline" suggesting that I could have saved money by booking at advance fares etc. I again wrote to "thetrainline" and asked them to not send me any more emails, especially since I am not the customer involved. They replied that again, they had looked into the account and all is sorted.
What is worrying me is that I have actually purchased a rail ticket online to travel to Grantham from London in August through the train company direct.
I even suspected the original email was perhaps phishing and made sure I didn't respond to the email, but searched the website and replied that way. I suppose my question is has this happened to anyone and should I be worried? Thanks in anticipation.

 

[snail]

I recently received an email from "thetrainline" addressed to my email regarding confirmation of two tickets bought to travel that morning to Nottingham from London St Pancras for an amount of 124.00 pounds. I wrote an email immediately to "thetrainline" informing them that a) I was currently in Rome, Italy, b) I hadn't purchased any tickets and c) the credit card details did not match me.

Why did you bother? If you didn't make the booking and they don't have your card details then these things are best ignored.

 

[Paul Kelly]

the customer would obviously contact them because they needed the confirmation code to collect the tickets.

Not necessary, as long as they noted down the code from the screen immediately after the booking. Looks to me like someone just made a mistake entering their e-mail address and it happens to match yours.

 

[Greenback]

Email mistakes are not uncommon. I wouldn't really class it as suspicious, and I agree with snail that such messages are best ignored.

 

[Abpj17]

You should be able to trigger a password reset on the website if there is a valid account using your email address. (Although if it's not your card details being used, there would seem to be limited harm)

 

[Greenback]

It's always worth changing your password regularly in any case, so there's no harm in doing it now.

 

[blakey1152]

Sadly, it seems that recently more and more websites don't bother verifying that the e-mail address that someone has typed in does actually belong to the person that is using the web site at the time.

This of course means that if someone helpfully types in your e-mail address you could be bombarded with junk mail.
It should be made compulsory to verify e-mail addresses to stop this happening. I am more than happy to be sent an e-mail confirming its my e-mail address as it only takes a few seconds.

I had several incidents a few months ago where someone in the US was using my e-mail address to book car hire - Seeing as noone was taking any interest in the fact that this person was using the wrong e-mail address on about 7 different occasions. On the last occasion I was able to go into their car hire web site and cancel their booking for them (with a nice late cancellation fee to be added to the persons credit card) - needless to say they didn't use my address again!

Blakey

 

[ausrom]

Thanks everyone for your replies...appreciate it!

 

[Abpj17]

blakey - yup; somehow my email address has been used for someone to vote in Australia...I replied mentioning that I didn't actually live there...