>My wife and I, just being goofy, have an inside joke featuring a relatively uncommon name that we ocasionally yell out, like a few times a week. Two months ago we got junk mail addressed to UNCOMMON NAME + our last name.
Are you sure it's not because of an opsec fail? eg. you used your nickname when registering for some service, and that made it into some sort of mailing list? What you're seemingly implying (ie. that there's some sort of secret listening system that can figure out your nickname, tie it back to your address, and then send spam to that) makes little sense. Your name + address is already readily available. It's in the public records. You freely hand it over to random websites (eg. for online shopping). There's zero benefits in anyone making such a system to figure out people's names using surreptitious listening.
I am open to other explanations. I did not use the name as an online pseudonym, thats why I found it so odd.
I am not sure about there being no benefit either. We moved here very recently and scraping local property records would take time and not be easily automated. So what if some data aggregator still had a blank under the name field for our address and needed to fill it in so they could address letters since we more or less automatically throw away “current resident” letters. I just don’t know, yes its far fetched but I don’t see any other explanations as much more parsimonious.
Are you sure it's not because of an opsec fail? eg. you used your nickname when registering for some service, and that made it into some sort of mailing list? What you're seemingly implying (ie. that there's some sort of secret listening system that can figure out your nickname, tie it back to your address, and then send spam to that) makes little sense. Your name + address is already readily available. It's in the public records. You freely hand it over to random websites (eg. for online shopping). There's zero benefits in anyone making such a system to figure out people's names using surreptitious listening.