So I just got into NameCoins b/c my mining pool is now also issuing those. I went to register at a namecoin exchange and got an error that my email was already in use. Weird, i thought, but I guess I could have set up an account without remembering it. I went to retrieve my password and logged into the account without problem (it was a password reset so I have no idea if it's one of my typical passwords or not). Funny thing is that once I logged in, there were BTC there and NMC and all sorts of other currency there that I have no recollection of putting there. We're talking a pretty big amount, even if it was from a decade ago when I dabbled in BTC and then forgot about it, there is no way I had that many. We're off by a few orders of magnitude.
I figured that they were accidentally transmitted to a wrong address or something, but since BTC is untraceable, how do I return this money?
There is one more possibility, which is someone used my email address to signup for an account. The email I use for this account is something very generic, like
bob@yahoo.com (not actually it, but as an example). Could this actually be an active account that someone is using with a fake email address?
What do I do here?
1. BTC isn't untraceable, you can ask the exchange for the TXIDs that were generated when the specified address got the deposits ( most exchanges if not all, generate custom addresses for each user ). You can also check your deposit address on the blockchain to see from where the inputs came.
2. The idea that somebody actually sent BTC to a wrong address is almost as plausible as choosing a random number out of a pool of billions of different numbers and guess it.
3. Everything about this post sounds fishy.