# Hacked Hotmail accounts



## Alcalaina (Aug 6, 2010)

In the last month two friends of mine have had their hotmail accounts hacked, with their contacts receiving personalised emails asking for money: "Help, I'm in the UK and lost my wallet, could you advance me €2000 by Western Union" - that sort of thing.

These are pretty easy to spot, but one of them has just discovered that the hacker contacted one of her holiday let clients, pretended she was her sister, and successfully persuaded the client to send her the €700 rental payment! This happened a month ago but she only realised when she contacted the client herself yesterday.

Hotmail (i.e. Microsoft) have been pretty unhelpful, they just advise people to change their passwords regularly and not to use the same password on different sites. 

She has gone to the _policia nacional_ in Cadiz today to report it to the internet fraud people, but it is unlikely she will get her money back.

I've just gone through and removed all the links between my Yahoo, Google, Facebook etc accounts, changed the passwords and set my privacy settings so that nobody can see anything.

Anyone got any further tips or advice? Do those of you with holiday lets use Paypal or similar?


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## xabiaxica (Jun 23, 2009)

Alcalaina said:


> In the last month two friends of mine have had their hotmail accounts hacked, with their contacts receiving personalised emails asking for money: "Help, I'm in the UK and lost my wallet, could you advance me €2000 by Western Union" - that sort of thing.
> 
> These are pretty easy to spot, but one of them has just discovered that the hacker contacted one of her holiday let clients, pretended she was her sister, and successfully persuaded the client to send her the €700 rental payment! This happened a month ago but she only realised when she contacted the client herself yesterday.
> 
> ...


a couple of my friends have also been hacked recently -I was getting e-mails from 'them', but the mails were just links which I of course didn't click....

one of them has a yahoo account - so I don't know if it's just a hotmail thing - hotmail do have a 'my friend has been hacked' report button - no idea if it does any good though

I do/have used Paypal for payment of skype lessons when I used to do them & various other things

I've never had a problem with it


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## 90199 (Mar 21, 2010)

Make the prefix to your email address unreadable, something similar to this [email protected] this effectively blocks hacking programs also spam programs from finding your address and feeding off your address book,

Hepa


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## thrax (Nov 13, 2008)

Hepa said:


> Make the prefix to your email address unreadable, something similar to this [email protected] this effectively blocks hacking programs also spam programs from finding your address and feeding off your address book,
> 
> Hepa


Good advice although it doesn't stop intercept programs. We have recently started receiving emails supposedly from DHL, Fedex and other courrier firms telling me that my parcel has been sent and all I had to do was to open the attached file to get the details. Of course, the attached file is a trojan and a pretty nasty one too so if you get this type of mail ignore it, even if you are expecting a parcel from DHL (Amazon use DHL quite lot for Spanish deliveries). The clues are obvious though; the email will usually have many addressees (can't all be receiving the same package) and the spelling and English will be hopeless.


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