{
  "slug": "dormant-account-takeover",
  "title": "The safest account to steal is one nobody has opened in four years",
  "summary": "Every factor attached to an account decays with time. Dormant accounts are stolen quietly and never reach the statistics that set security budgets.",
  "lede": "Fraud models are trained on activity, which means they are blind exactly where the money sits unwatched. A dormant account has a recycled phone number, an expired recovery domain, and a password in six breach dumps, and nobody is looking at it. Safe reactivation has to prove the same person came back, or admit that it cannot.",
  "date": "2026-09-20",
  "reading_time": "12 min read",
  "category": "Security",
  "tags": [
    "dormant accounts",
    "account takeover",
    "account recovery",
    "factor decay",
    "identity continuity",
    "fraud"
  ],
  "image": "https://cdn.twc.sh/images/igcache/Dormant%20Account%20Takeover/1200_630/blog.jpg",
  "url": "/blog/dormant-account-takeover.html",
  "wordcount": 3817,
  "related": [
    "passkey-recovery-weakest-link",
    "recovery-without-the-id-upload",
    "add-authenticator-takeover"
  ],
  "schema": "Article"
}