empty messages

[Ronald Butters]

I have changed the password numerous times--on a daily basis. Had too, because whoever took over my account also changed the password each time I did. I finally called AOL (this is not easy to do, anymore), and talked to a woman in India who helped me change the password in such a way that seemed to stop the intrusions.

I know of one other AOL break-in: in that case, the message was one of those of the sort, "I have been mugged in Madrid and can't leave the country until you wire me some money."  Several such messages were sent with variations on the story (I don't know if they were all from hacked AOL accounts or not). My own hacker sent at least one message trying to get financial information about me, which is pretty scary.

My partner was the victim of a similar break-in at a hotmail account, and hotmail was totally no help; they didn't even give him a new password, so he lost all access to his address book and previous e-mails. The hacker,  however, sent "I am in Nigeria in jail, send money or I will rot here" messages to everybody in his address book. I am told that hotmail is particularly vulnerable to  hackers.
On Mar 3, 2012, at 11:38 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> Multiple Yahoo accounts have been sending out spam messages--and that's
> just the people I know. It seems there has been a massive security
> breach at Yahoo Mail. AOL is not related, but it might have had a
> similar issue. The difference, though, is that the Yahoo messages
> contain nothing but spam links. That's not what we have here. Have you
> considered just changing the password?

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