Blueyonder Deactivation

[becaroberts]

My mum's blueyonder email account has been hacked, causing lots of distress and phone calls to banks and three days of absolute hell trying to get them off access to all her accounts and on phone calls to virgin media who tell me there's nothing they can do to delete it. Submitted a complaint and was told someone would call me back but instead they called my mum back and told her she can delete it herself via a separate blueyonder website (an absolute contradiction to what we have been told by everyone in tech support). There is absolutely no sign of a separate blueyonder website that I can find anywhere and we are unable to delete this account. We are at our wits end and this has become an absolute living nightmare and surely is massively illegal - where is the duty of care to customers? concern about GDPR? Virgin Media are ALLOWING her to be hacked and are doing nothing to help. If anyone knows anything or any way of deleting this sodding email address that has caused me three days of stress and lack of sleep then please let me know. 

[becaroberts]

My mum's blueyonder email account has been hacked, causing lots of distress and phone calls to banks and three days of absolute hell trying to get them off access to all her accounts and on phone calls to virgin media who tell me there's nothing they can do to delete it. Submitted a complaint and was told someone would call me back but instead they called my mum back and told her she can delete it herself via a separate blueyonder website (an absolute contradiction to what we have been told by everyone in tech support). There is absolutely no sign of a separate blueyonder website that I can find anywhere and we are unable to delete this account. We are at our wits end and this has become an absolute living nightmare and surely is massively illegal - where is the duty of care to customers? concern about GDPR? Virgin Media are ALLOWING her to be hacked and are doing nothing to help. If anyone knows anything or any way of deleting this sodding email address that has caused me three days of stress and lack of sleep then please let me know. 

[becaroberts]

My mum's blueyonder email account has been hacked, causing lots of distress and phone calls to banks and three days of absolute hell trying to get them off access to all her accounts and on phone calls to virgin media who tell me there's nothing they can do to delete it. Submitted a complaint and was told someone would call me back but instead they called my mum back and told her she can delete it herself via a separate blueyonder website (an absolute contradiction to what we have been told by everyone in tech support). There is absolutely no sign of a separate blueyonder website that I can find anywhere and we are unable to delete this account. We are at our wits end and this has become an absolute living nightmare and surely is massively illegal - where is the duty of care to customers? concern about GDPR? Virgin Media are ALLOWING her to be hacked and are doing nothing to help. If anyone knows anything or any way of deleting this sodding email address that has caused me three days of stress and lack of sleep then please let me know. 

[Ayisha_B]

Hi @becaroberts 👋

Welcome to our Community Forums and thanks for your post. 

I am sorry to hear your Mother's email account has been hacked and for the poor experience when requesting for this to be deleted.

In order to remove any mailboxes, we need to speak with the account holder so if you can ask them to contact us directly, we will be more than happy to help further.

Thanks

[becaroberts]

Hi Ayisha, she has contacted you 5 plus times at the call centre to no avail. All we get is “it’s not possible while you’re still a virgin media customer and to not be a virgin media customer anymore than you have to pay an £800 exit fee then it will take three months for the blueyonder to be deleted”. I find it extraordinary that we have to pay for the privilege of moving to a provider who will protect her financial and personal data. Surely this is illegal? Can’t decide if it’s the police, ombudsman or ICO at this point. 
She has even submitted a complaint and the resolution we have received in writing that literally says “we can’t do anything”. The advice we got was “go on blueyonder directly to delete it”… great, except it doesn’t exist anymore. Do you have a direct phone number to someone who can actually help us and isn’t the tech team who fob us off with different claims about blueyonder?? We are getting desperate. 

 

[goslow]

Is the email account in question the main email linked to the VM account (for billing/management purposes etc.)?

I have rather lost track, in recent times, of VM's bizarre email security requirements but I think it used to be the case that the main email linked to the VM account could not be deleted.

[becaroberts]

It’s not the main email now, no. She has a totally different primary email. Spent another five hours on the phone to the call centre being passed around again today and had no luck 😞 tomorrow is another day of stress, I’m sure 

[用心棒]

If it is not the primary email account then when you sign in here Login to My Virgin Media | Virgin Media using the primary account's authenticator credentials is it listed under Account settings > Account details > Manage other My Virgin Media accounts? if it is do not delete it until you have re-secured it by following the advice here My Virgin media email has been hacked | Virgin Media Help.

Without revealing any personal information are you able to describe the type of compromise / hacking event that has occurred? For example, was it an email appearing to come from you, quoting a current or past password.

NB this form of threatening communication is a common tactic used by miscreants to extort victims and to improve the likelihood of success they deploy a  psychological ruse of including information that they have obtained elsewhere to imply truth and/or risk from other things mentioned in the communication.

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[becaroberts]

Hello, thanks for replying! No it isn’t listed anywhere on her “my virgin media”, I changed everything on there to a new secure email address and I’ve checked under all the different account settings. All that is listed is her outlook. The blueyonder mailbox is a totally separate “mailbox” tab. She has had emails like the above (not sure how they make it look like it comes from her - it’s so creepy!) and I explained to just delete them… I’m hoping she didn’t click anything! What worries me however, is we have had several companies locking accounts due to suspicious activity, many many emails in her inbox of them logging into her various shopping websites that she uses and has her card details stored, and even logging into MS Office to use the xbox add on to buy things. I’ve managed to secure everything they’ve accessed so far and informed her banks who have been fantastic etc but it’s like one thing after another! I think we must have finally covered everything then something else pops up! Finally got through to a useful person today after i was transferred 8 times who tried to forward me to the fraud team who could supposedly get us out of her contract so we could finally get this mailbox deleted and her off virgin media altogether, but i got disconnected. Never felt so distraught at my phone being cut off before. Back to the drawing board tomorrow. Day six and counting. 

[Graham_A]

If you have changed the username for the blueyonder email address to an outlook.com email address then that is the address that will appear when you log in to the My Virgin Media account.  The underlying blueyonder email address still exists but with the outlook email address as the username with the My VM password.  If you want to secure the blueyonder email address when accessing via an email client then you need to follow the instructions to generate an app password via the My VM account.  Otherwise the previous password will still work with email clients.