- Fires when
- An address you saved stopped working, and later serves a login page again.
- First move
- Close the tab. Do not type anything.
- What it usually is
- A near miss address under different ownership, inheriting recognition it did not earn.
- What it never is
- A recovery. Nothing retired returns under the same string.
- The mistake
- Relief. This one reaches people who have been doing this longest.
Why it reaches the wrong people
Every other trigger here is filtered by experience. This one inverts that. The reader most likely to hold a long dead address is the one who has been doing this longest, has the strongest sense of knowing what they are doing, and is least likely to look closely at a string they recognise.
Familiarity does all the work, and familiarity has never been evidence of anything.
What you are actually looking at
Matching the first four or five characters of an address takes minutes on an ordinary machine. Seven or eight takes days and is still practical. Matching all fifty six is impossible. So the forgery always has a familiar opening and a middle that differs, and the middle is the part reading skips.
What prevents it entirely
Pruning. If retired addresses do not survive in your file, there is nothing to paste months later. That is the whole content of the pruning task, and it is the clearest example on the site of a boring monthly habit preventing a serious outcome.