My email address was stolen!

That is both scary and frustrating. I think one way that happens is when people forward e mails and do not use BCC. You end up with any virus anyone else has and your e mail address is up for grabs.

estherlou, First of all, I am really sorry that this is actually happening to you and it just go to show how bad these scams have gone. I hope that you are wary that of the various scams and identity thefts on the internet where you could ill afford to ignore or be careless with your email and social networking accounts. Since you are quite active with your emails you should just look out for suspecting and unsolicited emails where they actually ask you to visit a particular website, open a zip attachment and / or open an executable file or program to correct or process a follow up on some major error in your account. So, have no second thoughts or proceed any further but delete it, have nothing to do with it. Any further venturing will just bring more problems or troubles to your current peaceful status and life. Do be careful and prudent. Take care and have a nice day.

I hate it when things like that go on. I am glad that you have caught it. I have gotten those emails from friends before.

I had exactly the same thing happen to me a while back. Mine was a similar message about me being stuck in the United Kingdom. I actually found out that not only did they meddle in my e-mail account, but they got into my eBay account and started bidding and buying things on my account and not paying for them. Luckily, most of the sellers were smart and didn't fall for it. I also had to change my email password, the password on the modem and scan for viruses using their security program, but found nothing. My ISP and e-mail provider were no help at all saying that I had a virus, of which I didn't.

hi estherlou a year ago my best friend Nelda got an email saying her cousin was in England and got mugged at gunpoint and needed Nelda to send her $1500 dollars right away so she could go b ack to her home in kansas. Nelda called her cousin at her kansas home and learned that this email was a hoax, so Nelda got ahold of a criminal investigator for internetfraud, sent him this phony email and they caught this person who had sent out a thousand phony emails almost the same wording all being mugged in London and needing 1500 dollars to get back home and gave a London address. So she was saved sending that money that was being picked up by the crook. So she had to do the same thing you did, and now she s okay again.

yeah it happens also in our country they were told their friends in the email that something happened to him and they need cash and to be emailed to the given address. good for them they check him out and called him if it was true. he answered that he was very much in good shape and nothing happen to him. these hackers are really bad. its better to change passwords of your email from time to time. hope we will be cautious enough not to meet these hackers in our life.

This is the first time that I have heard of an incident of that nature, but it is not really surprising considering your ISP account password is all that would be required. I had a problem last year when I suddenly received a vast number of returned emails from all over the place. None of them were my actual email address but were made up names using the suffix of my address. The only reason that they were returned to my inbox is that I operate a "Catch all" address in case someone misspells my name. It was obvious that they had all been sent from within my domain so I contacted my ISP about it, mainly to ensure that I was not accused of spamming. They told me that someone had accessed my domain and sent out bulk spam emails, which I was very annoyed about. Even without my password they managed to do that, so I was not impressed with the ISP security at all.

It happened to a friend of mine who is into dogs. I received an email on the same lines as you were saying. Thus I immediately contacted her daughter through another email and she reassured me that everything was ok and that her mother was fine. I think it is our duty to change email password from time to time. Besides that having a good anti virus and anti spyware will help us to protect us from such hackers.

This happened to a friend of mine a couple of years ago. The person who stole her account sent emails to all her mates and family asking for a sum to get home. It was so convincing. The amount was much smaller because she said she "still had her ticket fortunately and I already paid my hotel bill" and just need you to send $200 for food and cabs till I get on the plane....a much more reasonable request. Yes, it would be a pain to have to change everything.

those scammers stop for nothing. Lucky that they contacted you before they believed it, otherwise it would have been you they looked bad upon. Hope everything is cleaned now and this won't happen again to you. Have a great day

i understand what you are dealing with as something similar to this has happened to me very recently. someone or something is using my email to send some stupid site to all the contacts on my email list. I had gotten a little bit lazy about doing a scan on my computer, since i have only had the laptop for about 4 months and not had any problems with it at all so i really hadn't thought about it then this had started to happen so i finally scanned it last night and it found 12 files yikes. so i got rid of all of the bad files and i hope that this fixes my problem since it was becoming quite annoying to me and probably to anyone on my contact list. i really only had one friend that had contacted me about the problem, but i tried to let anyone know that i was not doing it so i wanted to make sure that if it was coming from my computer that i try to find the problem and to get rid of it immediately.

Those nasty bugs. I think you should check your system a bit more often, and have a few e-mail adresses. But, I'm glad you got that phone call. Most spam is redicoulous like that. I've recieved e-mail from spammers like that too, but they are dome enough to use masking programs to make it look like I sent the e-mail to myself. Have an e-mail handy for certain things to handle spam and junk in case this happens again.

Hello, The Trojans are usually classified as spywares. The main purpose of spywares is to send your private information to the programmer of those things. Hackers extensively use trojans to find out passwords and other vital information. Other methods are still there, but they are somewhat arbitrary and more difficult to accomplish. A Trojan will record the keystrokes in your machine. It captures the screen from time to time. With all this information, it usually sends an email to the person who planted it in your computer. Suppose you've visited a site, which can be detected by the screen images it captures, then you have put your username and password to log in, which can also be determined by the keystrokes recorded at that time. Trojans usually makes your machine slow as it always runs in the background. Trojans can also be detected by abnormal flow of data through your internet connection. The bulk of data that is being exchanged may suddenly increase for no apparent reason, which is a sign of having one or more Trojans planted in your system. Trojans can also be attached to an apparently harmless program. This program installs the Trojan first and then the main program, the user being complete unaware of what is going on behind the screen. I hope everything gets back to normal as soon as possible. Take care God bless you

Please use a proffessional mail service like yahoo , or better Gmail. You can recover your passwords through their forgot password method. They offer spam protection and also prevent uploading of malwares as attachments in most cases. Also get yourself a nice anti virus , ot may also be a free one like avg, avira. Most important of all , be careful while you login from public computers.

woww... that is really a pain and good on you to be able to find it out early and solve the problem... i will be very upset if it happens to me... but again, that's why we have to always be careful on the internet because lots of hackers nowadays trying to steal our personal information... take care and have a nice day...

So sorry. and I have heqard about this as one person had sent the money to the person then found out later that they had never gone to London ! Boy thats alot of crap to go thru!

I don't forward emails very much. I get a lot of those emails people send and they ask you to forward it. I trash it. It is too big of a risk to pass those things around. There are some I do not even open.

Sorry to hear that and I know it is a pain, seems everyone is out to scam someone. My email is full of I won's, I was left a fortune, my deposit has been made, my checking account with such and such bank has been stopped. All waiting for your reply or for you to open it so as soon as you do it shows them this is a working email address. I play canasta in a yahoo game room and one I would say lady, but she is far from that has hacked my account twice now. I made a 26 letter password and told her now lets see you get into my account, she has done the same thing with the accounts on Facebook. I have found that just deleting all the junk mail with out opening any of it, leaves them with nothing showing that this is a working account, I had a trojan that allowed a person to play at a casino and took nearly $3000. out of our account before we could get it stopped. They will try anything, yes glad he checked first. there will always be scam artists no matter what you do or where you go. I found also that the longer the password is the better you are, took me a long time to remember those 26 letters and it is a pain to have to put them in each time but keeps them out too.

I'm so sorry to hear that,I met one thing like yours.that my phonenumber is changed,and many account on the Internet of mine should be changed.it's so troublesome.hope you can finish it soon.

You know what, I have encountered that too. I received a message from my former co employee, asking for help. She said, the hotel that she was in was robbed-- she went out of our country for business trip. She said all her things was taken and left no money. She was asking me if I can send her some 1000 dollars and she said and promise to repay me as soon as she gets back to our country. I sent or emailed her back asking several question about the incident but replied very short. I got suspicious, then ask again about personal stuff regarding her and our company... Then that's it! I don't know how those hackers do it.