October 19th, 2009 
Jojo Agot 
Keeping your identity online is no small feat at all. You start with a simple email account and before long, you are already subscribed to at least ten different web services.
What’s confusing is keeping tabs of your usernames and passwords. If you’re like most people I know, you probably didn’t give your real name to Yahoo or Google. I didn’t. When I first opened my Yahoo email almost ten years ago, I didn’t know my online and offline lives will ever collide.
Yesterday, I made a transaction with a US-based domain reseller using my Paypal account. The transaction started smoothly but later I couldn’t verify the payment. The reason? There is a discrepancy between my email and Paypal account names. The company’s Anti Fraud Department sent me a letter to check if I am not a hacker or a spiderbot.
If you’ve never received a letter from America with an Anti-Fraud seal in the letterhead, you wouldn’t know how bad it feels to be doubted. I had to produce documents to prove that I am who I claim to be.
The issue was resolved in lesss than an hour after I sent them some screen shots of my receipts but this was clearly a bad case of inconsistent account names, an online identity crisis of sorts.
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