Yahoo Email Hacked! Help!

May 8, 2008 11:09 AM

My Yahoo! email was hacked. What can I do?

My Yahoo! email address was hacked and now I can't get in. They sent email to my friends and family saying I was stranded in Canada and that I needed money. Obviously, this isn't true. The hacker has changed my acct information and I cannot retrieve or change my password thru yahoo's forgot password mechanism. What can I do? Who can I contact? Is there some one I can call at Yahoo? I searched their help pages and cannot find any info related to my situation.

I need to get this acct back, as it is tied to my flickr and countless other online accts!

Please help. Thanks.

posted by blueplasticfish to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Here. Contact Yahoo customer care.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 11:17 AM on May 8, 2008

Exact AskMeFi question from a few years ago.

There's a crapload of resources that discuss this all over the web. I got about 2 million hits just by typing yahoo stolen account.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 11:25 AM on May 8, 2008

Send a mail to all your friend and relatives saying that your account has been stolen and all the mails sent from that address are not genuine.
posted by WizKid at 11:45 AM on May 8, 2008

Yeah, you'll have to contact Yahoo support. (Don't know how easy that will be, though.)

Important: If you have a PayPal account connected to that email address, cancel it or change the password immediately. Check to make sure there have been no unauthorized transactions. My gf's Hotmail account was hacked several months ago. Once they did that, they got her password and mailing address and then managed to get into her PayPal account. (Fortunately, they were obviously fraudulent to the eBay users whose auctions they bid on, so no loss occurred. They tried really hard, though.)
posted by mudpuppie at 12:12 PM on May 8, 2008

the other posters are correct but I feel compelled to chime in and help you a bit so you don't have this problem in the future. ignore this post if that's not desired.

if your paypal account or other sensitive data have ben compromised, consider contacting the police. a report will make it easier to later prove that you did not sit by idly while business in your name was conducted. carefully think about all possible accounts and begin altering passwords accordingly. if financial information has been compromised, raise a fraud alert with all three credit reporting agencies. even if you don't think any accounts have been breached, do consider changing ALL passwords at this point. start a new set of three passwords: one really difficult and long one for banking and such stuff, one similar for email and one quick throwaway password for less important sites such as this one (sorry, matthowie. I know you'll understand).

please don't take this as anything but an attempt to help you but do notice that most likely you have made a mistake that resulted in your password being compromised. was it too easy a guess? did you type it in on a page that may have looked like a yahoo login page but wasn't? (good clue: having to enter the information twice.) that's how myspace accounts get "hacked" all the time. there are of course other options, I'm just saying that this is fairly likely what has happened.

this is a great moment to begin thinking about more secure passwords (read: complicated long combinations). they're not difficult to remember: take for instance this password I just made up: tfitpIjmu2135. those were the first letters of each word of the previous sentence plus the time I wrote it at. it's easy to remember a sentence or a phrase.

good luck.
posted by krautland at 1:40 PM on May 8, 2008