There have been several large data breaches over the last few years. This website lets us check if our email has been compromised in any of the breaches. have I been pwned?

yes I have been pwned.

Though I knew that already as my ebay and paypal accounts were hacked earlier this year, someone was selling non-existent storage devices with bogus listings on my account, a lot of folks had fallen for the sham and paid for them, luckily I had noticed this and had notified both ebay and paypal who put a stop to payments being paid out.

I don't know if they got away with any of the money paid by those taken in by the sham, but I had to endure a lot of angry emails from folks asking where their items were, plus it was a pain having to change log in details to all online accounts and I do now change these on a regular basis.

Since I clicked on the 'have I been pwned' link I've had even more daft emails - Russian, Malaysian, Filipino and Thai women, windows and bitcoins etc. Beginning to think I'd not had a look.

I was concerned that it might be harvesting email addresses, but have not experienced any increase in unwanted mail. (least not so-far!)