Another NTLWorld email hacked thread
Hi there,
I'm writing this one on behalf of my other in law who has had a @ntlworld.com email address for about the last 20 years but like most people of that era has used a poor password on it.
With us both having made various calls to Virgin Media today it seems that she has never had an actual Virgin Media account, or at least never had one that's been linked to this email address. to the best of her knowledge she got this address around 2000 and I don't think was still with NTL at the time of the NTL>Telewest>VM mergers.
I have read through some of the posts on here which say she is out of luck on a password reset but I figured I would put this one in here to just be sure about what can be done.
Right now she still has access to the address and has done without issue for 20 years but the password has been guessed by a scammer who will periodically email her one of the 'send me some bitcoin' emails - but will send it from her own address along with telling her the password. Ideally we can just change the password and be done with it. Is this possible and who should we talk to?
I'm happy to send the email address in a dm to someone representing Virgin Media.
Thanks
The problem here is that if your MiL isn’t a current VM broadband customer, then the only thing that the forum team here can do is to arrange for the email address and mailbox to be fully deleted. At some point she must have had access to a legacy NTL broadband account to get the address, once this terminated, then the email should have been ended some 90 days afterwards. In practice this doesn’t always happen promptly and they can linger on in a sort of zombie state. But are always liable to be deleted without further warning at any time.
It is very likely that her email hasn’t actually been hacked, but rather she used the same password on another site, sometime in the past which has been. Imagine, for example that ‘Fred Bloggs Hardware’s’ site gets hacked and the hacker gets away with a load of email addresses on passwords used on that site - knowing that, alas, people still tend to use the same password on many sites, they take a punt and email everyone on the stolen list and as, ‘I know your password is xyz’, so pay me money or else!
Like I said, if she isn’t a customer, VM won’t help to change the password and allow her to continue using the email address, at best they will offer to delete it. So what I strongly suggest is that you create a new email address for her with another provider; both Microsoft and Google offer free .outlook.com and .gmail.com addresses. Having done that, if she is still able to send and receive emails from her existing ntlworld.com address, then she starts the process of going through all of her contacts and informing them of her new address, to be used in the future.
Then she can request VM to delete the old mailbox entirely, which is likely to happen at some point anyway.
