Apparently I am traveling in Europe and was robbed. Cash, airline tickets and all credit cards were taken, luckily I had left my passport at the hotel but I needed money to catch my flight today.
The crooks changed my email address by capitalizing one of the letters so unless you look very carefully you would think it is from me. Papa Bear's address was in my address book too so he got an email from (me) and I replied back to the fake address to find out where to send (me) some money. Once Papa Bear was on the way to the Western Union office he is suppose to send them an email and then when home email them the confirmation number. The crooks asked Papa Bear for $1400.00 with a promise that I could repay him as soon as I returned home.
Most everyone in my address book knows our home situation with us as caregivers for our son and we certainly would not be traveling in Europe. I just hope and pray no one fell for the scam who doesn't have our cell phone numbers to verify. We stopped using land lines several years ago.
I don't know how hacking works but I know I had to jump through hoops to try to contact Yahoo about this. I had to verify my password several times and then give them my security question and answer. Seems to me that if my location is in Florida 99% of the time wouldn't all kinds of bells and whistles have been going off at Yahoo when "I" logged in from Nigeria?
We have had internet for about 17 years and this is the first time we have had an event. Guess we've been lucky.
I had an email from a friend saying the same thing this past summer. I sent her a PM on facebook to ask what was up. She said she had been hacked. i sent out an email to all my contacts telling them if they received this type of email its not me.
ReplyDeleteI get emails that ask for my help in cashing a check or some BS. I reply that this email has bee forwarded to the FBI and DHS among others. End of their crap.
I have had emails from people I know that were hacked. They tried to sell me Viagra...LOL I do get the money scams but they are never from anyone I know.
ReplyDeleteI thought about replying again from Papa Bears computer but I thought it may make things worse. Until someone actually sends them money, there's nothing much that can be done. The law always seem to be on the criminals side.
That happened to a preacher Im know, too. I think they get a lot of their victims from email petitions. Incidentally, email petitions are 100% useless and usually ARE phishing endeavors.
ReplyDeleteI had something like that happen not to long ago from my yahoo email account. The hacker sent a bunch of advertisement emails to groups I was subscribed to from India. Someone from one of the groups explained that they can do it through some open node in windows when you stay logged into your yahoo mail or my-yahoo page and then rout the emails through to your address book.
ReplyDeleteI have no clue if that explanation is correct or not. Personally I think hackers and virus programmers should be hunted down and made an example of.
This wouldn't have been so bad but they completely took my address book. I had to go back through some old mail and found some of my contact's addresses. Last night I found I could ask Yahoo to try to restore my contacts list...no guarantee.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime I switched over to my Wildblue account and will be using them. I don't know if they are any better or not. At least there is no advertisements so far but I think their entire setup is powered by Google or seems to be. All of the news on the home page is CNN which I hate. I can delete the CNN gadgets but so far I haven't found a way to add the content I would like.