Why do I suddenly have a Square account?

[Heidi6]

Hello, I am not a merchant, I have no customers and have no reason to have ever created a Square account.

I only know about Square because some of the stores I shop at use Square to take my credit card payment and I put my email address in to get my receipts emailed to me. But I have never created a Square account.

Now suddenly in March 2023 I started receiving emails from Square as if I had a merchant/seller account with them. These are legit emails from Square, not phishing emails. They are from noreply@messaging.squareup.com. The subject line says "Updates to your Square Account" and the emails inform me that: "As a reminder, there will be an upcoming changes to Square’s refund policy, as well as updates to Square’s terms of service, all of which will be effective as of April 11, 2023. Processing fees will no longer be refunded to your account when you issue full or partial refunds to your customers. You do not need to take any action and there will be no change in the experience for your customer."

I have no idea what they're talking about as I have no customers. I am not a merchant and have never created a Square account of any kind. I have no emails from Square that you normally receive when you create an account, so zero records of ever creating an account with them.

I went to their help pages (help for merchants) and decided to click "forgot password" which enabled me to create a password to an account that apparently already existed. I'm in my dashboard now (at https://squareup.com/dashboard/) and there doesn't seem to be any activity that I can see but I'd sure like to know how and why an account was created for me. It only has my first name, no last name, and my email address. 

Does anyone have any insight into how or why this happened? After I get a satisfying answer, I plan to deactivate and delete the account since I'm not a merchant and have no need for Square.

Thanks!

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @Heidi6.  It is entirely possible that someone else used your email address to create a Square Seller account.  They might have done this by accident because they mistyped their own email address which could be very close to yours.  Anyway, for whatever reason, if you want to confirm with Square that the account is indeed dormant/never used, you can contact them here.  But I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to tell you exactly how this happened. 

Regards,

[Heidi6]

Thank you @TheRealChipA! I have contacted them but haven't heard back yet.

Yes, I suppose someone could have done it accidentally by entering my email address instead of their own. However, if that were the case then I should have received an initial "thank you for creating your account" email from Square, or some sort of email requiring me to verify my email address (a safe-guard Square should have in place whenever a merchant tries to create a Square account). I have never received such an email (I did a thorough search, including my spam filter).

My suspicion is that Square did it by mistake as they do have my email address in their system (as a customer from when I enter it at stores to get my receipts emailed to me). My suspicion is that Square accidentally sent emails intended for merchants to people like me (who are merely customers of merchants). These customers then get concerned and click the option to reset their password so they can investigate their supposed merchant account.

I guess it's a minor error and I should just delete this Square account, but I do think Square should look into this and make sure they stop sending merchant-specific emails to people who are merely customers of Square merchants. It's a bit of a sloppy mistake for a large company handling so many people's sensitive data. (Or even if it was some random person who created an account with my email address by accident, Square really needs to have an email verification process in place to make the person verify their email address before allowing the account to be created).

Anyway, thanks for your response! If I hear back from Square support with a clear answer, I'll update this thread in case this ever happens to anyone else in the future.

[uxcs]

The same sloppy mistake also happened to me. Just today. Please explain why.