Secondary account gone plus bitcoin threat/hack?

This form of threatening communication is a common tactic used by miscreants to extort victims. To improve the likelihood of success the miscreant will deploy a  psychological ruse by including information that they have obtained elsewhere to imply truth and/or risk from other things mentioned in the communication. For example, the miscreant may quote an old or current password that the victims uses or used to use.

For further advice see Report a phishing attempt | Action Fraud

FYI you only need the App Password when using an email client, like Thunderbird or similar. For My Virgin Media and Virgin Media Mail (webmail) use either your email address (or third-party email address if recently changed) along with the account password (this is not the App Password).

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It is possible because the message is not sent via Virgin Media's email server but another insecure email server that does not validate the “From” address.

Consider following the advice here, My Virgin media email has been hacked | Virgin Media Help, to recover access to your email account. If the issue persists post back here to flag to forum team.

bodiesmum,

You may well have already hit the nail on the head when you said in an earlier post "...seemingly sent from...". It is unfortunately all too easy for spammers to spoof display names, so the mail may appear to come from you or your (secondary) account, even if it doesn't. This can happen, as 用心棒 explained if the ougoing email service doesn't validate the sender's email address. If you use Outlook it is very easy to inspect the mail header - right click on the mail header in the list then select message options and by checking the various "from", "reply-to" and "envelope-from" fields in the message header that is displayed it should be possible to tell whether or not the mail really did originate from your account: If any of "from", "return-path" and "envelope-from" are anything but your exact email address (with no addiions) then your address has probably just been spoofed (it happens all the time); if they are all set exactly to your email address then your account may have been hacked.

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bodiesmum wrote:

  I received info from virgin about setting app password which I did.  Since then I have been unable to access it but still receiving email on my computer.

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When you set up the mail app password for your VM account did you have to specify a non VM email address (perhaps a Gmail or Outlook address)? That would have been the email account that received the verification email from VM for your password change .

If you did specify a non VM email address as part of that process then that email address will become the username for your VM webmail and My Virgin Media accounts.

So when you sign into VM webmail you need to enter that non VM email address (not your VM address) as the username together with the VM password. Your VM email address will remain unchanged.

Confusingly, the email settings in your email client will remain unchanged, so the username field in Outlook should stay as your VM email address.

By the way, emails such as the threatening email you have received have been doing the rounds for years. They are simply scams not hacks. As others have said, the scammers simply spoof (fake)  the sender's address. They do that to scare your into believing that they have access to your account so you will pay the ransom they demand.

Coenoby