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October 31, 2026

By Kim Komando

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Happy Halloween, friend. Tonight the zombies come out. The scariest ones won’t ring your doorbell. They’re already in your inbox.

I’m talking about zombie accounts, of course. The Pandora login from 2012. The Groupon you used once. The dating app, the photo site, the store that wanted your birthday for a coupon. You stopped using them. They never stopped holding your name, email, address and that old password you probably reused.

In one Secure Data Recovery survey, 94% of people said they had at least one account they hadn’t touched in a year.

🧟 Why the dead keep walking

The big email companies clean house. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can close accounts after a year or two of no sign-ins. That random shopping site? It keeps your data forever.

• Old sites get breached, and your old password leaks along with them.
• Crooks take the email and password from that breach and try them on your bank, your Amazon and your work email. If you reused it, they’re in.
• A zombie social profile can be hijacked to scam your friends, in your name.

And watch this one: If an old Yahoo or Outlook address is the backup email on your bank account and it gets deleted, you can lock yourself out for good.

🪦 Your 15-minute zombie hunt

• Dig up the bodies. Search your email for “welcome to,” “confirm your email” and “verify your account.” Every hit is an account.
• Check your saved passwords. iPhone: Open the Passwords app. Android or Chrome: Go to passwords.google.com. That’s a list of every site you’ve logged into.
• Find the shortcuts. Google: myaccount.google.com/connections. iPhone: Settings > your name > Sign-In & Security > Sign in with Apple. Remove anything you don’t use.
• Bury them. Go to JustDeleteMe.xyz. It has direct delete links for hundreds of sites and rates each one easy, medium, hard or impossible.
• Let AI hold the shovel. Paste the names of your dead accounts (never passwords) into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and ask: “Give me step-by-step instructions and the direct link to delete each of these accounts.” Menus change, so double-check.
• Can’t delete it? Change the password to something unique and erase your address, birthday and phone number.

One more thing. If an old email is your backup address anywhere, log in to it at least once a year to keep it alive.

Do it before the trick-or-treaters show up. Why don’t zombies eat clowns? They taste funny.

🗣️ Text/post this stat: 94% of people have at least one zombie account they haven’t touched in a year, still holding their name, email and old password. GetKim.com

📩 Send this to someone who still has a Hotmail address from 2004 and a Groupon account they’ve forgotten about.