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Secondary account gone plus bitcoin threat/hack?

bodiesmum
Tuning in

Hi

I'm hoping someone can help

last year I was able to access my secondary email account via webmail & computer.  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.

But past few months have been receiving tonnes of spam, which I have been blocking.  But received threatening email today FROM my secondary account email address demanding ransom be paid to a bitcoin account?

So worried now that my account has been hacked and I've got no way of checking or accessing it?

Thank you in advance

 

15 REPLIES 15

用心棒
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

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).

-- 
I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more
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Thank you for replying however the email is seemingly being sent FROM my email TO my email?  How is that possible?

Also I needed to use the app password with my email my client but that's not working now either.

I used to be able access the secondary account via webmail but even if I request a password reset it's just saying unable to verify email/password

用心棒
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

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.

Hi thank you again.

I have tried all of the suggestions on that page but it's still not recognised.☹️

davidas99
On our wavelength

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.

Hey bodiesmum, thank you for reaching out and I am so sorry to hear about this.

So you can still access the emails however you are getting a lot of spam?

Or it only on certain websites you can log in?

 

Matt - Forum Team


New around here?

Hi Matthew

thank you for replying.

Up until I messed up the password on my laptop email client I was still getting and able to send emails, just no access to the account on webmail.

I've lost access to mail client on my laptop now ...which was my fault as I forgot the password.

As I said though the account has disappeared from Virgin webmail?

 

Thanks for coming back to us @bodiesmum

You say that this has disappeared, do you know if you're still able to send an E-Mail to the address without it bouncing back?

Thanks,

David_Bn

Hi David

thank you for responding.

Yes, I've sent a couple of test emails and they haven't bounced & a couple of friends have said the same