non existent email addresses

[MartaG8]

This month I had 33 nonexistent email addresses that bounced.  I normally have one or two bounces out of my 300 subscribers.

Where did all these contacts come from??  Most of the addresses looked like gibberish, and many looked like they came from foreign countries. I never got informed that they were new subscribers.  Am I being hacked or something?

[William_A]

Hello @MartaG8 ,

What is the frequency of your subscriber update notification? Additionally, what is the source of the contacts? If the contacts are also bouncing as non-existent, then it's a simple enough matter to delete and unsub them while viewing your bounce report. 

Most likely, a bad actor came across one of your sign-up forms, and added the gibberish addresses until the reCaptcha or a similar protocol kicked in to push back against additional new sign-ups without human verification. If this is becoming an issue for your contact management / billing, you might want to temporarily turn off or remove the sign-up form that’s causing the problem. Then, you can re-enable / re-add it after some time has passed.