Kevpulcella wrote:
someone trying to get money from me because they are on my account, not happy at all!!
If that email is from someone saying something along the lines that they have a video of you on an adult website, and threatening to send it to your contacts unless you pay a ransom then it's all a complete lie,
It is very easy for scammers to spoof (fake) the "Sender" address in an email to make it seem as if they have sent it from your email account.They do not actually need to have access to your email account to do that.
They often include an account password in their email but they will have got that from a data breach on an online account linked to that email address. In may cases, people have reported that the password in the email is not their email password or it is an old password that was reset a long time ago. (The link to the ncsc below gives a website where you can check whether your email address has been part of a data breach.)
The whole email is designed to scare you into paying the ransom but is a complete scam.
See here what the National Cyber Security https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/sextortion-scams-how-to-protect-yourself say about it.
As far as moving the account over to your new VM broadband account, VM do seem to be able to move old VM email accounts over to an existing VM broadband account provided:
- the original VM broadband account that was used to create the old VM email account was in the same name as the current broadband account
- the request comes from the VM broadband account holder themselves
In addition, there are a couple of issues I am not certain about but I suspect:
- the broadband account that you want to receive the old email account has to be one that was created prior to May 2022. The reason I think that is because VM stopped issuing new email accounts in May 2022 and since then new VM broadband customers have not had the option of having VM email accounts
- There seem to be issues moving virgin.net email addresses over possibly because many of those email accounts were created as part of the old Virgin internet dial up service and so have never been attached to a VM broadband account.
One of the Forum Team (VM staff who support this forum) should be contacting you via this tread and can give you the official line on all this and help you get it sorted.
What I would suggest is that you ask the Forum team to delete this old VM email account. I say that because:
- It will be deleted by VM at some point anyway if it is not attached to a live VM broadband account
- Scammers may not have access to it but they obviously know about it so it is on their radar and you cannot stop them sending other scam emails to it in the future
- Clearly email is no longer a major part of VM's business plans going forward so you would really be much better off using an email account from one of the main email providers .
Coenoby
