I had a similar thing happen to my yahoo account. Friends wrote me saying they received a Viagra ad from me. I also got several mailer daemon messages about undeliverable emails. I assume this must have happened by someone hacking into the yahoo account as a bot on my computer probably wouldn't be able to send out SMTP mail on a web account. I also checked my computer for rootkits, spyware and viruses ant it came up clean. I changed my yahoo psw and security questions. Has anyone heard of this kind of thing happening?
Gabriela
May 11, 2010 3:15 AM
I have read all this so you can do nothing
Mike K
May 11, 2010 8:40 AM
One of the thing that spammers do is spoof your email address in the sender field so when someone receives an email it looks like it came from you but in reality it did not. We see this all the time where I work. We even get emails that appear to come from our domain but have a non-existant name on the email address. There really isn't much you can do in cases like this. Spammers send out millions and millions of emails to random addresses. Some get to real people some just go into cyberspace.
Craig Fearing
May 11, 2010 8:48 AM
Hi Leo
This is a trivial comment, but it's not often we can catch you making an error like this one. You wrote "if you like, you can continue to attempt to recover the old email account - perhaps for some piece of mind - ". Which piece do you suggest, frontal lobe?
Seriously, though, keep up the good work. I recently got a request for such aid from a person I barely know, but in this case it was so plausible I really started to believe it. Fortunately, he contacted me to explain the problem before I had time to feel too guilty about ignoring that mail. I hope none of his friends got taken in by this. Thanks for helping raise awareness of this problem.
Bill Chubb
May 11, 2010 10:55 AM
A dear friend of mine had a similar problem recently with a Hotmail account and was unable to get any help from so-called "customer support". As has been correctly said above, it's the price paid for a free e-mail account.
Gabe
May 11, 2010 1:38 PM
I feel if you're account has been compromised and you decide to change the password, you must also look deeper into your profile settings and see if any FORWARDING is being done. Gmail, for example has an option to forward any account activity on to another account. If the hacker is really using your account, they'll probably put a forward address in that setting if it's available. Therefore, the password you just changed has been forwarded on to the account that's in this forward setting.
I received such an email with a tale of woe and asking for money supposedly from a dear friend on a trip to London UK. I wrote back asking for an address to where I should send the money and back it came. Meanwhile I had phoned my friend and found she had not left Canada. I then located the Brit fraud squad address and sent them copies of the emails and the mailing address the con artist had sent to me. I did not get any response from the British bobbies so I don't know what the outcome was.I picked up the ruse because of the wording in the fake email - it did not sound like my friend's writing. So the outcome was OK for me.I don't know if anyone else got stung by this scammeer
zorro
October 23, 2010 1:51 PM
A couple of other variants that I've seen happen:
1) Intruder changes the password, then changes alternate contact address to something he controls. Thus, if the service does a password reset by sending email to the alternate address, then the message gets sent to the intruder and not to the owner of the account.
2) Intruder sets an auto-response message, where all inbound messages sent to the victim's account get another spam message.
I am presently trying to deal with the Hotmail people with regards to our hotmail account being compromised. Our account has been scammed to our contacts with the message of my husband being held up in Spain, requesting 2500 Euros, please send money to satisfy the hotel bill. I am presently feeling that the scammer has got more rights than me as I am having one hec of a time trying to regain access to close it down. I need to gain access to close it but they will not give me access until I validate all the information which I am not 100% sure of and can only go my memory. What a nightmare! A lesson well learned. I would never rely on any free accounts for business. I have presently set up a new account to communicate with them. Yes, I have a thread going back and forth with them but the confidence is just not there that I will get my problem resolved.
Danny
December 7, 2010 10:44 AM
Call up your friends and tell them the situation and they should email all their contacts. It's probably that you both have many contacts in common.
Comments
Read the article that everyone's commenting on.
May 8, 2010 10:08 AM
I had a similar thing happen to my yahoo account. Friends wrote me saying they received a Viagra ad from me. I also got several mailer daemon messages about undeliverable emails. I assume this must have happened by someone hacking into the yahoo account as a bot on my computer probably wouldn't be able to send out SMTP mail on a web account. I also checked my computer for rootkits, spyware and viruses ant it came up clean. I changed my yahoo psw and security questions. Has anyone heard of this kind of thing happening?
May 11, 2010 3:15 AM
I have read all this so you can do nothing
May 11, 2010 8:40 AM
One of the thing that spammers do is spoof your email address in the sender field so when someone receives an email it looks like it came from you but in reality it did not. We see this all the time where I work. We even get emails that appear to come from our domain but have a non-existant name on the email address. There really isn't much you can do in cases like this. Spammers send out millions and millions of emails to random addresses. Some get to real people some just go into cyberspace.
May 11, 2010 8:48 AM
Hi Leo
This is a trivial comment, but it's not often we can catch you making an error like this one. You wrote "if you like, you can continue to attempt to recover the old email account - perhaps for some piece of mind - ". Which piece do you suggest, frontal lobe?
Seriously, though, keep up the good work. I recently got a request for such aid from a person I barely know, but in this case it was so plausible I really started to believe it. Fortunately, he contacted me to explain the problem before I had time to feel too guilty about ignoring that mail. I hope none of his friends got taken in by this. Thanks for helping raise awareness of this problem.
May 11, 2010 10:55 AM
A dear friend of mine had a similar problem recently with a Hotmail account and was unable to get any help from so-called "customer support". As has been correctly said above, it's the price paid for a free e-mail account.
May 11, 2010 1:38 PM
I feel if you're account has been compromised and you decide to change the password, you must also look deeper into your profile settings and see if any FORWARDING is being done. Gmail, for example has an option to forward any account activity on to another account. If the hacker is really using your account, they'll probably put a forward address in that setting if it's available. Therefore, the password you just changed has been forwarded on to the account that's in this forward setting.
14-May-2010
July 4, 2010 12:05 AM
I received such an email with a tale of woe and asking for money supposedly from a dear friend on a trip to London UK. I wrote back asking for an address to where I should send the money and back it came. Meanwhile I had phoned my friend and found she had not left Canada. I then located the Brit fraud squad address and sent them copies of the emails and the mailing address the con artist had sent to me. I did not get any response from the British bobbies so I don't know what the outcome was.I picked up the ruse because of the wording in the fake email - it did not sound like my friend's writing. So the outcome was OK for me.I don't know if anyone else got stung by this scammeer
October 23, 2010 1:51 PM
A couple of other variants that I've seen happen:
1) Intruder changes the password, then changes alternate contact address to something he controls. Thus, if the service does a password reset by sending email to the alternate address, then the message gets sent to the intruder and not to the owner of the account.
2) Intruder sets an auto-response message, where all inbound messages sent to the victim's account get another spam message.
24-Oct-2010
November 22, 2010 1:13 PM
I am presently trying to deal with the Hotmail people with regards to our hotmail account being compromised. Our account has been scammed to our contacts with the message of my husband being held up in Spain, requesting 2500 Euros, please send money to satisfy the hotel bill. I am presently feeling that the scammer has got more rights than me as I am having one hec of a time trying to regain access to close it down. I need to gain access to close it but they will not give me access until I validate all the information which I am not 100% sure of and can only go my memory. What a nightmare! A lesson well learned. I would never rely on any free accounts for business. I have presently set up a new account to communicate with them. Yes, I have a thread going back and forth with them but the confidence is just not there that I will get my problem resolved.
December 7, 2010 10:44 AM
Call up your friends and tell them the situation and they should email all their contacts. It's probably that you both have many contacts in common.
Do the same on you social network accounts.
To post a comment on "Someone's stolen my email account and is scamming my contacts for money, what do I do?", please return to that article's main page.