Watch Dogs Website Leaks Real World E-mail Addresses

Watch Dogs, Ubisoft's paranoia-inducing open world thriller about hacking and data distribution, was revealed at this year's E3 and left many salivating with anticipation. However, in an ominous case of life imitating art, a promotion for the game has leaked hundreds of e-mail addresses belonging to people who signed up for an alternate reality game based around one of Watch Dog's characters, Joseph Demarco.

An e-mail detailing the fictitious character's demise contained the e-mail addresses in the Cc rather than the Bcc box, and affected anyone with an e-mail address beginning with a number or a letter up to I in the alphabet. This has reportedly left many on the receiving end of mass spam attacks.

The e-mail leak is deliciously ironic in the context of the game's central theme, but it seems a bit much to be a planned publicity stunt and is most likely a genuine and unfortunate mistake. One thing is for sure, though; after accidents like this and the PSN hacking fiasco, Watch Dogs will be highly relevant to the age we're living in when it hits the shelves next year.

Comments

  • Avatar
    roughplague
    12 years, 4 months ago

    Wow, thats disturbing, but also hilarious and ironic. Hopefully nothing bad will happen to the e-mails involved.

  • Avatar
    Vunik
    12 years, 4 months ago

    Eh, it only showed their e-mail, but not their passwords or anything. Spam is a daily occurrence for anyone who uses an e-mail, so this isn't THAT big of a deal.

    However, this goes to show that it's always best to have an e-mail starting with the letter Z.

  • Avatar
    Zladko
    12 years, 4 months ago

    I'm sure it was all in the fine print.

  • Avatar
    CrossOutlaw
    12 years, 4 months ago

    if it is all for marketing/ not real info than its all good and pretty smart, but if it is real ppl's info and they are willingly releasing it just to market the game than they are fucking retarded. you dont need to market the game. Every "gamer" (hard or casual) knows about this game. I mean really this and 1313 are pretty much the closest we got to next gen gaming.

  • Avatar
    bigbazz
    12 years, 4 months ago

    Awwww shit.....that sucks

  • Avatar
    Greg the Keg
    12 years, 4 months ago

    Well I'm sure that's a real pain in the ass for anyone who used a school, work or home email that can't be easily changed (rather than a hotmail, gmail or yahoo account that are a dime a dozen), if they're being bombarded with spam.

  • Avatar
    Skittles0520
    12 years, 4 months ago

    That's kind of funny and odd at the same time...what did they really expect to happen when putting someones' personal email address on the internet....derp.

  • Avatar
    Brad
    12 years, 4 months ago

    As someone who's email address was in the leak, I gotta say.... meh.

    If you can't deal with some spam, you probably shouldn't be using that email address for signing up for random junk on the internet. Let alone for something that's sole goal is marketing. Not surprising in the least that it happened, and not worrying in the least to me personally. Meh.

  • Avatar
    Soha
    12 years, 4 months ago

    Yeah, you can tell this was supposed to be a really sweet marketing campaign that just went ... very wrong.

  • Avatar
    Bob Webb
    12 years, 2 months ago

    I usually only expect this kind of failure from Sony. Good job Ubisoft.