Comments | teenygozer: OH MIGHTY FLIST, INFO PLS?

teenygozer

OH MIGHTY FLIST, INFO PLS?

Jan 07, 2011 11:28

This morning I woke to find that someone quite evil grabbed my hotmail account's address list and sent out spam (or possibly worse) to the people on it. The email looks like it's from Telzey Amberdon, which is my hotmail name. It bounced to a lot of defunct addresses I still had in there. I can still get into my hotmail account, I wasn't locked ( Read more... )

rl, disease-of-the-week

Comments 5

ibshafer January 7 2011, 17:55:40 UTC

I don't know how they do it, but it certainly does happen often enough.

Just this week, I got a note from a friend saying that she was on a family vacation in Scotland and had been robbed, at gun-point. They'd lost everything, but their passports, "thank god", and now needed $$$ to get home. (At which point they'd pay me back immediately...) "We're really freaked out right now and just need your help."

As the recipient of many a "I am So-and-So, writing you from the Nigerian embassy, blah, blah, blah" note, the first thing I did was find out if she'd even gone to Scotland. Turns out she hadn't and someone had seen her at work just that day ( ... )

teenygozer January 7 2011, 21:52:57 UTC

Hey, I got FIVE notices regarding your one post, did you keep goin' back and editing? :) I won't think less of you if there's a typo, you know ( ... )

ibshafer January 8 2011, 01:03:20 UTC

Yeah, yeah, my bad... Wasn't spelling so much as me not making sense. I re-read and said, "Seriously? You can do better than that..." Sorry about the multiple notices. Forgot lj does that.

What's even creepier is that there were a few notes back and forth between me and Fake Sue. First, I had asked that they answer a security type question, something I knew only Sue would be able to answer - they ignored it and reiterated that they were "freaked out." (Apparently, we Americans use that word a lot... ;) )

I only spoke with her for a moment, we're not in regular contact, but I got the sense that Hotmail was the one to tell *her*. And actually, if I remember correctly, it's actually her daughter's account, which she just uses - which shows you how "into" having an email account she is. She probably doesn't go on the Internet at all... (She's older'n us.)

chelseagirl January 7 2011, 19:03:06 UTC

I'm still getting spam from a student from last semester whose account was hacked like this so I'm glad you were able to get on top of it so quickly. I take it Telzey is no more?

This kind of thing's been going on long before . . . well, long before I was conscious of Facebook. I feel like they've been turning up periodically for at least a decade . . .

teenygozer January 7 2011, 22:00:54 UTC

Nope, Telzey is alive and well! I checked my outbox and did not see a single spam email. They somehow got hold of my (rather antique) Hotmail addressbook, they didn't actually get into the account. I would like to know how this happened, how they could see the email addresses in my address book. I was hoping someone with greater knowledge than myself could point and say, THAT IS HOW THEY DID IT, and THIS IS WHAT YOU DO TO STOP IT.

On the up side, because of this, I was alerted to the fact that my alternate email address was from about 8 or 10 years ago, so I'm working on getting that changed over time... it takes about 28 days to get rid of a "lost" address! Then you can put in a new one.