Email hack

[oldmanbob]

Two days ago I had a senile moment and fell for a phishing scam so that persons unknown gained access to my email account and have been sending out scam messages apparently from my account. These have been reported by some contacts in my email address book.

I looked for online advice and followed this. In particular:

I changed my password

removed a 'forward to' email setting created by the scammer

ran a virus check, which found nothing

I have confirmed that at least some email messages I have sent out have been received but incoming emails are not reaching my inbox, suggesting that they might still be being diverted.

Do technicians at Virgin Media step in to help? I would ask a technician if I could find a way to speak to a human being.

Any advise is welcome

[coenoby · Accepted solution]

---

@oldmanbob wrote:

removed a 'forward to' email setting created by the scammer

incoming emails are not reaching my inbox, suggesting that they might still be being diverted.

Any advise is welcome

---

When you say you have "removed a forward to email setting"  that sounds as if you have removed an autoforward.

If you have not done so already, I would suggest that you also need to check your Virgin Media Webmail account to make sure that the hacker has not sent up one or more filter rules.

It  sounds as of the hacker may have set up one of more filters so that emails are being diverted away from your inbox.

To check that, sign into your email account via the VM website, you can use this link https://mail2.virginmedia.com/  

Then follow steps 1 - 4 as below

If there are any filter rules set up with an action of "Redirect to" then you should delete them by clicking on the

icon on the extreme right of that line.

If there is still an autoforward set then that will show in the list of filter rules (as well as under the "Auto forward" setting in the left hand menu) and you should delete that as well.

Coenoby

[oldmanbob]

Coenoby,

Thanks for your advice which appears to have completely sorted my problem so that, as far as I can tell, emails are now reaching my inbox.

The scammer has been sending fraudulent emails, apparently in my name, to contacts taken from my address book but these messages are so obviously a scam that there is little risk that anyone will be fooled. I guess I cannot stop this and it will be up to the recipients to deal with it. However, if it proves to be a continuing problem for lots of my contacts, I am minded to abandon my Virgin Media account and use an alternative, perhaps Gmail.

If I go down this route, I realise that I will need to migrate emails and contacts and I think I can work out how to do this. However can I ask Virgin Media to delete or disable my account? If so, how do I go about this given that there is no apparent route to give this instruction?

Finally, thanks once again. It is so refreshing to have a stranger giving valuable advice for free. It restores my faith in human nature.

[Reece_MH]

Hi @oldmanbob,

I'm sorry to hear that you've had some issues with a phishing scam. I'm really glad to see that you've managed to resolve this with the support of @coenoby. In regards to the emails being sent in your name, this would be unavoidable from our end, as the phisher may be "Email Spoofing" - which is the process of faking the email address and name to the recipient. 

If you still have the Phishing Email, you can report it to our Security Team by forwarding it to phishing@virginmedia.com - one of the team will investigate this. Once you've forwarded the email, you can delete it as normal. 

In regards to closing the email and using a 3rd-party, this may be possible depending on how your emails are setup on the account. I'm going to pop you a PM to get some more information so I can look into this, and support you further. Please look out for the purple envelope in the top-right of the forums.

Cheers,