I keep getting single-use codes for an email of mine

Reported
Anonymous
2023-08-07T18:47:04+00:00

I have been receiving everyday a single use code to sign into my account with an email of mine -- I have had this email for over 15 years -- someone is trying to get into it. it has a phone number listed with the last digits being 80. my number has NEVER been that. I don't understand how I cannot reset my password without sending a code to that number. this is really starting to piss me off... especially since there isn't a number I can call to contact an actual person. I have gone through putting in my information to try and recover the account, yet it says I didn't provide enough evidence supporting my claim of ownership to this email.

Mod note on Sept 1, 2025.

Brought here by a search? Please read the Post by Sumit on the last page of this thread.

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-02-04T22:35:02+00:00

    Last month I recently began to get this email. I've changed my p/w a few times now, making it more complex. Thing is I beleive this is a hack attempt.

    Try this - within your MS online account

    > click on the 'shield' icon on the left side

    > click on 'View my ' sign-in activity'

    On my email I see from 5 to 10 attempts (Unsuccessful sign-in) from many different countries on this planet. This happens every day. I suspect if I look through the history there may be attempts from other planets - who knows

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-02-05T12:23:42+00:00

    Yes, there's little doubt that these are hacking attempts. For my part, the last time i got a single use code sent to my back-up email address was about 10 weeks ago, so i feel less alarmed about this than i did.

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  4. Anonymous
    2025-02-05T13:00:32+00:00

    I posted a reply to this thread a few years ago wondering the same thing as you. I discovered that, ultimately, it means that your email address was included in a data breach for something not related to outlook or Microsoft. As mine was clearly an outlook email address, the attempts to login to my outlook were incessant using the password that was included in the data breach, like 20-30 a day. I disabled the ability for the email address to be used to login to my outlook, (I'm now using a different one that I use for nothing else) and the attempts to access my outlook stopped immediately.

    Separately, every now and again, I get requests for one time codes and these relate to websites where you used your outlook email address to register. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not give you the ability to track where your outlook email is being used to login. It's a deficiency that has been pointed out time and again for years and they never fix it.

    My recommendations:

    1. Go through your inbox and search for emails with "subscription" or other related terms and identify every website you have subscribed to using the affected email address.
    2. Go to "haveibeenpwned" (google search) and input your email address. This website has indexed all the data breaches the contents of which have been posted on forums or the dark web. It's quite useful. This should help identify which data breaches your email address was included in.
    3. Go to the websites you have identified and either request that your account be deleted or change how you login to it. This should stop most of the one time codes

    Hope this helps, I know the so called Microsoft experts are completely useless and clueless.

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  5. Anonymous
    2025-02-06T03:00:27+00:00

    much appreciated. I didn't know about haveibeenpwned, and it shows 8 data breaches. One being Adobe, which I have a subscription. Thing is, it seems once my email is out in the Dark, I'm not sure if deleting this account\subscription will stop the annoying hacker emails.

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