Odd email which appears to come from VirginMedia

[MartJ]

Just had an email from allegedly from VirginMedia, thanking me for contacting them today, the first paragraph stated

“Thanks for getting in touch today. As you couldn’t give us the right characters from your memorable word, we suggest setting up a new one as soon as you can. It won’t take long and it’ll help keep your account safe.”

The main problem with this is that I haven’t contacted VM today

There is a link in the email to login, but I am not that stupid and won’t be clicking. 

I suspect it’s some sort of phishing attempt, but the content and the footers seem quite genuine, no grammar or spelling errors! 
The email address had a .co.uk suffix, which I never seen used, but the email looks quite good and some people may get taken in.

I also had an email stating I had requested a copy VM mobile will for August, which I didn’t request, all these leads me to believe that there has been a hacking attempt on my account. 

[goslow]

Certainly sounds like some kind of attempt to access your accounts might be going on.

Do you have/have you had a VM (or NTL World, Blueyonder etc.) email address in the past?

Beyond my tech skills to suggest how the scammers go about their activities but, from reading a lot of topics on the forums, it seems that an email/password combo for a past email account with VM, or its predecessors, seems to be a common vulnerability for those who have experienced some kind of hacking attempt.

Those who are worst affected seem to be the ones who have used the same email/password combo across multiple accounts and services.

[coenoby]

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@MartJ wrote:

“Thanks for getting in touch today. As you couldn’t give us the right characters from your memorable word, we suggest setting up a new one as soon as you can. It won’t take long and it’ll help keep your account safe.”

The main problem with this is that I haven’t contacted VM today

The email address had a .co.uk suffix, which I never seen used,

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Virgin Media do send emails from @VirginMedia.co.uk so that of itself is not suspicious.

However, it is certainly possible that the email itself is genuine and someone (aka a hacker) has contacted VM claiming to be you.

However, I admit to being a bit mystified by " a copy VM mobile will for August" but I am sure I'm missing something obvious there!

If you do have a Virgin Media Broadband account or Virgin Mobile account I would suggest that at the very least you sign in to tose and check the details to make sure that everything looks in order.

Also, I would play safe and change the password and security information on those accounts. Changing/resetting the password for My Virgin Media and email accounts is not a straight forward job now. VM are insisting that you switch to using a non VM email address as your username to sign into your VM email account.

One of the VM Forum team (VM staff) will contact you via this thread, hopefully today and they may well be able to look into this for you.

Coenoby

[MartJ]

@Coenby yes it should have said bill.

A bit strange that you have to switch to a non-VM email address to change password, seems no logic in that. 

It does seem to take a long time for someone from VM to contact, especially where it could be a security issue

[goslow]

I think the .co.uk VM email addresses can be allocated to individual staff IIRC. The support forum notifications are from .co.uk and I have had package change notifications and surveys from .co.uk in the past

I assumed 'will' = 'bill' via a bit of wonky auto-correction?

[goslow]

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@MartJ wrote:

@Coenby yes it should have said bill.

A bit strange that you have to switch to a non-VM email address to change password, seems no logic in that. 

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I think that the logic of doing this might possibility be linked to the likely future prospects for VM's email service perhaps?

[Matthew_ML]

Hey Martj, thank you for reaching out and I am sorry to hear you've been getting these request.

I have taken a look and everything is looking okay on our side but I would be happy to take this to PM to confirm everything if you wish? Cheers 

[coenoby]

@MartJ

This. Is a community forum so the first responders are VM customers such as @goslow and myself.

However in view of your concerns I have escalated your original post to the Forum Team

Regarding the change to using a non VM email address. VM have apparently. done that. to improve the security when changing passwords. They now send a notification to your non VM address

Not an ideal way of improving security but that's their choice.

Coenoby

[MartJ]

I am wondering if this has anything to do with the migration of my mobile account to O2 this coming weekend, I certainly haven’t called VM for sometime and it seems strange that a copy of my August bill was requested. I assume you will,have on record somewhere details of who made this attempt. I don’t particularly what to change things when there is a migration planned, 

Happy to conduct via PM

[MartJ]

Not the best solution, now have to have 2 email addresses in order to change the VM one, not sure how that improves security given that email is not the most secure medium, I would much prefer the code to be sent to my phone than to another email address which could compromise my security if VM hacked again, potentially giving any hacker not one email address, but 2.