My ATF had her e-mail hijacked (hotmail). Details are unimportant... Apparently happened a couple of months ago. She must have been having it forwarded... she has discovered the password is changed & she can not access the account! Since I have a separate hobby mail account, this does not concern me overly, though it certainly hurts her business. The lastest is a scam... her gentlemen have been getting e-mails that she's stranded in Europe & send money so she can get home. Her friends are calling her phone to find out what's going on! I hope this does not happen to others. skb
Hacking email with "social engineering" is pretty widespread now. Sarah Palin's yahoo mail is such a case. In Russia, a number of politicians and journalists (mostly oppositional) were also victims of such crimes.
The lesson is to set a proper security question, not something like favorite pet's name (which can probably be found in your blog or mentioned somewhere on open discussion boards.)
This sucks! I have seen quite a few stories like this from providers over the years. I know Hotmail is convenient but I've heard some pretty terrible things about it's security issues over the years.
and it was dreadful! All of a sudden, I got an email from my colleague who seemingly was on the streets after failing to pay a hotel bill after attending a psychologist conference...in guess where...Lagos! The "story" was such that he had been robbed of all his cash, and now the hotel was demanding payment for his stay...in cash, natch. Ha! I played along for a while, emailed back, and eventually got some type of telephone number. I decided to call and it was answered by some guy on a mobile phone in a suburb outside Lagos, where the hotel purportedly was located. Believe me, I gave the guy a piece of my mind.
It took me a day or so to locate my colleague, who was absolutely horrified. It turns out his Yahoo account had somehow been hijacked by some Nigerian scammers and apparently, emails were going out to all individuals in his address book. Meanwhile, my colleague contacted Yahoo, but there was not very much they could do. He had to shut down the account. Lord knows how many innocent friends and acquaintances fell for this scheme. But the email looked extremely authentic. I have no idea how these people figured out he was a psychologist...maybe they googled him, who knows.
In any event, I hope this sorts itself out for both the provider and all the innocents in her address book. Scary with these 3rd party mail services...
This scam has been used for a while. I had it happen to me a few months ago and when I did some "googling" on it I found discussions about it going back several years.
Mine was a gmail account, and the hacker said I was stranded in Africa. The hacker sent emails to all my contacts, every contact in my sent folder, and set up an auto reply agent that would send the same distress message automatically to all new emails I'd get.
I believe these hackers work the "lost my password" feature of these free email systems to somehow get the password reset and then they have full control of your account.
I found it ironic that when I contacted Gmail to report the hack, their "Fraud Prevention" policies/people wound up turning me away. They said the password had just recently been reset and it can not be reset twice within a certain period of time (2 weeks I think). Funny how the hacker didn't get turned away but I did, go figure.
I waited a few days and submitted another request to Gmail. To my surprise a person (not an auto response system) actually replied, they asked some questions about specific names in my address book, recent emails I'd sent, etc.. and they then reset the password again for me.
Hotmail has seen this happen many, many times over so tell your friend to be persistent with them.
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