The other day, someone I have never heard of IM’ed me on AOL Instant Messenger wanting to know who I was because I had looked at their profile. I never look at people’s profiles, but they copied and pasted a record of who had looked and my user name showed as having looked at their profile last October. I reported this to Aol, got a canned response, and today when I signed on, I got an ‘Invalid User Name’ message. I looked at my log in box, on which I only have 1 screen name, and a name had been typed in which looked something like ‘**9%’. I never tamper with my screen name, I have auto-log-in, and this has never happened before. Does anyone have any insight about AIM software? Could my account have been hacked into?
When I was a AOL user, I was hacked once, but your case doesn’t sound like a hack, just sounds like someone looked you up. That is one thing I hated about AOL, among multitudes of others. My only suggestion is that you change your preferences to either only members on your mail list can IM you, or do what I did, and select no one. Otherwise this will be a common occorance.
Another thing, as for them saying that you looked at their they are full of BS. They cannot know who viewed their profile, and obviously if they were IM’ing you they knew your screen name and made up something.
Sorry, I guess I should read more closely. One more thing about the added screen-name, if it’s on your PC it could be only added from your PC. So the other screenname **9 or whatever it was was added by someone using your PC. I would suggest that you not store your password, if others have access to your comp. If you are really paranoid about it, call up or IM AOL and change the pass.
Well, I read something on this board recently about new Aol software that allows users to see the IP addresses of anyone who looks at their away message. Also, this person who contacted me didn’t seem to want anything, it wasn’t like a pick-up, and they showed me the list of user names that had checked their profile and the exact time and date. Also, I live alone, so nobody else used my computer.
There most certainly are add-ons that let you log people who access your profile. I’ve been IMed by people whose profiles I looked at, but never contacted myself. October was a while ago. Is it possible you did look at it, but just forgot?
I don’t know how AOL works, but with AIM, you can’t be “looked up” unless you check the box that says “I want people to be able to look me up.” There’s also a way to block people not on your list, I don’t know, just in case somebody guesses your screen name at random.
I know if you click on the user’s ‘Sub Profile’ your screen name will be recorded (you can tell because the URL is www.subprofile.com/blahblah&(yourscreenname)&(hisusername) or something like that. They aren’t affiliated with AIM, but if it’s linked from their profile and you click on it, you’ll be recorded. That’s how subprofiles make the "Users who’ve visited my subprofile’ section, even if the people who visit don’t sign a guestbook and whatnot.
Either that, or he found you from a directory and made the story up.