Someone hijacked my yahoo and emailed all my friends that I’m stranded in England with tears in my eyes having just been mugged and relieved of my cash, credit cards and even my jewelry. I didn’t realize it was that easy to hijack someone’s yahoo account. They did it in the middle of the night so I didn’t know until someone called me during the day. So - will my new security questions save me from this in the future?
Thank goodness they didn’t get my diamond tennis bracelet and ruby toe ring.
Man, that England is a dangerous place - two of my friends got mugged and robbed and stranded there and they were tearfully writing to me, too. In really poor grammar and embarrassingly horrid spelling. I guess getting mugged does that to a person.
They did that to my Hotmail account a few months ago. Then they changed the passwords and questions so I was locked out. I had to set up a new account and reformat everything. The big pain was that I lost all the correspondence associated with that account as well. 7 years of emails gone.
Silenus, how did they get the answers to your questions? Can those be hacked? Good grief, I guess nothing can be secure.
I’m a little embarassed to admit, but I actually half fell for this when I got an email from my friends hotmail account.
Before you go calling me an idiot, let me explain my thought process. First off, I checked the header of the email and saw it came from the actual hotmail account. Usually these kinds of things come from mail forwarders, and a quick check of the header indicates as much. So that added some legitimacy to the whole thing.
Second, my friend being in London unbeknownst to me is fairly likely. He’s travelled internationally on short notice (three different jobs have sent him to Abu Dhabi three different times) - hell, he’s lived in both Nuremberg and England for several months at times. So the idea of him being in London didn’t make me bat an eye.
The email I got didn’t have terrible grammar like the typical scam does. Full of run-on sentences and missing a few punctuation marks - but my friend isn’t exactly an english major either. So in a hurried state of mind, its plausible.
Finally, the whole ‘tear in my eye’ bit. Even though noone accused my friend of having great english skills, he still will often write with a little bit of attempted literary flair. Of all things, that phrase made me most think ‘This could very well be true - it sounds like him’.
Two thoughts crossed my mind that made me question it, though. One - why would he be emailing me and not his wife? For a normal person, that’d be an obvious red flag. Not necessarily the case with my friend - it is not uncommon for him to email me a random thing about something #$(*ed up in his life. Sometimes he just likes to vent.
Second - why bother emailing me at all? My friend is a very resourceful guy and he’s not afraid to do whatever he needs to do to get help.
In the end, I just replied to the email, providing my cell phone number and said to call me if he needed anything. There was just enough ‘hmmm, sounds odd’ and just enough ‘hmm, this actually seems like it might be legit’ to make me figure I should at least respond.
A couple weeks later he informed me of the real story of what happened.
Hey, quit knocking England. I have won their National Lottery 5 or 6 times now…
As far as I can tell, they swiped my password and got in, then changed the password and questions so I couldn’t.
This happened to me last week too, only I was apparently in Spain. One friend fell for the initial email and replied asking how to send money. The scammers wrote her back with Western Union details. Fortunately she realised it was a scam at that point and didn’t send anything. They locked me out too and I had to go through the security questions to get back in. I’ve now got a stronger password as the old one was admittedly weak.
…not to mention the amnesia it can cause. Could you believe some people are so traumatized they can’t even remember the whole event afterward? It’s like it never happened in their mind… it’s so sad.
I suggest that if a friend of yours gets mugged in England and E-mails you, that you send them all of your bank details so they can at least get some money to live on.
This happened to a friend of mine a month or so ago. When I tried to email him to let him know that his account had been hacked I got a reply from the hacker. When I called my friend it turned out that they had been away from home most of the day, and got back to find umpty-eleven phone messages telling them about the hack, and they were in the middle of trying to get logged back on so they could change their password.
Have any of you that have had your e-mail accounts hacked ever responded to one of those stupid Facebook or other social networking sites “get to know your friends” surveys? Or answer these questions and we’ll tell you your secret porn name surveys? Those surveys use a lot of the same questions that the security questions for your e-mail or other accounts use.
I got this email from the account of someone I only knew peripherally. I sent it to others she had copied on an email she once sent me, noting that this appeared to be a scam and asking that she be alerted to the hijack.
At that point I had an extended exchange with the scammer, with me expressing concern as to “her” plight, offering helpful suggestions, asking for details as to how I might help etc. I was planning to send them running to Western Union with a fake #, and was just researching how one might come up with realistic-looking numbers when I got an email from the person who owned the account, who had just gotten her account back.
Amusing episode.
A friend of mine was mugged in Wales a few weeks back. Managed to teleport back to the US in time to get my text message about it (I guess the muggers didn’t get her cell phone).
She has no clue how they got her Yahoo password. I’d seen a rash of this (including one from a Doper) lately. Even a congressman (or senator?) got hacked and “mugged”. He was in Scotland though. I wonder if it’s safer in Ireland :D.
I don’t know how your account was hacked but but Palin’s (last rep. vice pres. nominee) yahoo account was hacked by googling the answers to her secret questions. I am guessing that inspired people to just start trying googling and/or guessing at secret questions.
cites: google.com, bing.com, yahoo.com.
I was apparently in France when my Gmail account sent a phishing attempt (from a mobile device) to everyone in my Gmail address book. The first I knew about it was when I got a emails back going “LOL”, “Fuck Off” and “Change your password”. It looks like Google broke the URL on the sent item but shit, how often do you check your sent items? To be honest my Gmail password wasn’t the strongest, but it wasn’t totally idiotic either.
I have an account <myrealname>at earthlink.net, and <fake name> at earthlink.net.
I emailed myself that I was mugged, asking me to send myself money to get home yesterday … 
:eek::rolleyes::smack:
I checked my sent mail both on the webmail function and on all 3 of my computers and my cellphone, and I actually never sent it, it was spoofed.
It took awhile to find out that my spoofer changed the “reply to” in my email to send all replies to an email in England.
Apparently the email is still good. I think I’ll sign them up for a bunch of stuff 
this is the alternate email they put in my email account
This one needs to be out and about too!
It drives me crazy that folks put in all these password policies, and tell users (correctly) that they shouldn’t use things like the name of their pets as a password, and then set up a deliberate security hole to get around passwords, using things like names of pets.
I keep reading this thread title as “muggled in England” and every single time, I’m confused.