Old email account hacked?

[fish77]

Hi, I've not been a Virgin customer for over 6 years but have had a Blueyonder email address that has been active on my phone since I left, a couple of days ago I started getting attempted extortion emails spoofed from my own address on it, "you've been watching porn and we've recorded you on your webcam, pay £400 and we won't send the videos to your contacts" type of thing, also a few attempted password changes on old forums and a facebook account I've not used in years

I set up an email client on my PC just so I could get the headers and see where the emails actually came from and reported them to the host of the smtp server who are investigating it but today I got a notification to enter the password on the email account and can no longer access it, I tried to reset the password a few days ago when this started happening and the website doesn't recognise the account which is no surprise seeing as it's been 6 years so don't think it has been changed but would like to know if it's possible to find out as none of my old Virgin media logins work anymore apart from this one

[fish77]

Just to make things clear I'm not interested in getting control of the account back, it's dead as far as I'm concerned, I received notice about it being deactivated sometime after I ended my broadband contract and it obviously never was, I just want a bit of help finding out what's happened to it considering I lost control of it a few days after it was compromised, I'm getting nowhere trying to contact support, if the account has been hacked and ends up being used for anything illegal then that's on Virgin

[coenoby]

---

@fish77 wrote:
 I just want a bit of help finding out what's happened to it considering I lost control of it a few days after it was compromised

---

One of the Forum Team (VM employees who support this forum) can arrange to ensure that old account gets deleted completely. That will resolve the problems you are seeing. They should pick up on your posts in the next day or so and take the details from you by Private Message.

Sadly VM often allow these old email accounts to linger on long after they should have deleted them and that often leads to situations such as the one you are seeing.

VM also often confuse matters for ex customers because they often merely remove access to the webmail account, (which means you cannot access the email account from the VM website) but  do not get round to deleting the mailbox itself. That means that email apps such as the one on your phone continue to pick up any spam or scam emails that are sent to the account.

Keep an eye out for a post from one of the Forum Team shortly.

Coenoby

[Ayisha_B]

Hi @fish77,

Welcome back to our Community Forums and thanks for your post!

I am so sorry to hear your mailbox has been hacked. When your services are disconnected, access to the email account is usually deleted after 90 days, so I do apologise this has been missed in your case.

I'd love to look into this so will pop you a PM now so we can confirm some details first. I will then raise a ticket with our IT team so that the mailbox can be permanently deleted 🙂

Please keep an eye out for the purple envelope icon in the top right hand corner of your page for my message.

Speak soon!