Email account has been hacked.

[porker]

Something else worth checking out is whether your email has been pwned. Search for "Have I been pwned" and check if any breaches have leaked your email address and which accounts these might be. If you use these credentials for other sites I suggest you change details for these.

Don't trust anything (probably not even this message)

 

[phil p]

I‘m still getting emails from all over the place, EBay Germany saying my password has been changed and someone in Texas asking me to send money etc.

Is there anything I can do to stop these?

Can my internet provider (Talktalk) fix this for me?

 

[Sgian Dubh]

I‘m still getting emails from all over the place, EBay Germany saying my password has been changed and someone in Texas asking me to send money etc.

Is there anything I can do to stop these?

Can my internet provider (Talktalk) fix this for me?

Just keep marking them as spam, and maybe select block sender. There was a time when I would get 20 or 30 spam emails sometimes more than once a day, all sent at the same time, which also all arrived in my BT inbox en masse within a sixty or so seconds period. They were obviously spam because the sender's addresses were always gobbledegook, a series of letters and numbers. All I did was put a tick in the box next to each of those emails in BT's server and marked them as spam. It was tedious and rather time consuming but eventually they stopped arriving - it took maybe two or three months for the flood of spam emails to tail off.

As an aside, I always go to BT's server first to see what email's have arrived and check them out for being either harmless rubbish I don't care about and delete, or spam I want to mark as spam and possibly block, and do so, before I open Outlook, my email server, do a Send/Receive to get and deal with emails important to me. Slainte.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Most of my spam addresses end @onmicrosoft.com

 

[paulrbarnard]

They tend to come in waves after your email gets sold to a new spam artist. You can keep reporting them as spam which will eventually get the sending email blocked or simply ignore them. If I get a very persistent one I create a rule to delete them automatically.

 

[artie]

Can my internet provider (Talktalk) fix this for me?

No they won't help.

As far as my limited experience goes talktalk are the bottom of the barrel.

YMMV

 

[RogerS]

Phil p...are you on a PC or a Mac? If the latter then Mail has some excellent rules that you can apply. For example, you can create a folder titled, say, Crud and then a rule that says if the email is from anyone not in your address book then move it to the Crud folder automatically. That will give you a rough cut. Scan the subjects and names in that folder, chances are yu can Select All...delete. Job done.

 

[Cozzer]

To check to see if anything of yours has been breached, here's a useful site :
Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach
Enter your email address, give it a few seconds, and then scroll to the bottom. It shows the organisations that have experienced data breaches, and perhaps your details are also featured therein.
For example, I've just done one of my addresses, and found my details might be included in one of three listed. Adobe, for example, was hacked 10 years ago, and 153 million account holder details were stolen.

Hopefully your results give you some peace of mind.

 

[J-G]

This can only happen if you click on a link or allow images to be opened in the email.

Wrong!! - There will be a setting within your e-mail client which alowes (or not) notification that the message has been opened. This may not be so for every e-mail client but certainly is for some/many.

This does not preclude the fact that images (particularly .jpg) can also contain 'nasties'.

 

[sometimewoodworker]

I‘m still getting emails from all over the place, EBay Germany saying my password has been changed and someone in Texas asking me to send money etc.

Is there anything I can do to stop these?

Can my internet provider (Talktalk) fix this for me?

Change your email address

No your internet provider is unlikely to do anything for you.

If you use a gmail address the spam filters are good

 

[Owd Jockey]

Another way scammers/spammers worm their way in is by 'spoofing' your email address, or someone you have previously sent an email to in the past. I occasionally get emails from people I know, some of whom died some years ago.

Ok. This may be a high learning curve for some, but for many years I have had three email addresses, which I use depending on what or who I am dealing with. So I have an email account that I use for personal and potentially trusted sites, and the other two for one off purchases or getting access to sites. Over the years the 'junk' email address has become just that - full of junk, with the occassional bona fide transaction.. My email address for 'personal' use does have some junk/spam/scam stuff sent to it, but virtually all of the 'junk' is captured and directed into a 'junk folder'. Any good Mail system should have this automatic re-direction and automatic deletion after a period of time. My three email addresses are all Hotmail accounts.

Over the years I have also built up a large list of User names and passwords in order to access websites or make purchases. So much so they currently stand at two full pages of A4! I keep the list next to my PC, and amend occassionally. All of this takes effort, but in the long run it is worth it.

BTW, if you are an online Natwest customer, you can download Malwarebytes Premium for free for all of your household devices.

Stay safe and remember, never trust any email you receive, unless you have checked the senders address, or checked their credentials and even then be very suspicious and check with friends. People that seek to steal money from those who are vulnerable are scum of the worst kind and I would hope that very bad things happen to them.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Change your email address

No your internet provider is unlikely to do anything for you.

If you use a gmail address the spam filters are good

I gave up using gmail for anything of any importance when it started deleting stored emails at random - it would sometimes delete stuff two weeks old while ignoring stuff that had been there for years. It has been suggested that maybe I was close to storage limits, but atm the storage is 0.02%GB of 15Gb. The max. was 0.15%GB
I've just looked - it's now deleted everything ever stored.

 

[paulrbarnard]

To add to the excellent advice so far. Never click on a link in an email or text. Always use your normal way of getting to the website or call using the phone number you usually use for them.
I even go so far as to reject requests to verify myself if someone rings me claiming to be my bank and ring back on their normal number.

 

[phil p]

The swines have now accessed my EBay account and have entered their own password so I can’t access it, and trying to contact them is nearly impossible.

I think the only other place i have my credit card entered is Amazon so I have contacted my bank and they thought the best thing to do was cancel the card incase they make any purchases.

I would love to meet these people one day as they would be eating dinner through a straw.

 

[paulrbarnard]

The swines have now accessed my EBay account and have entered their own password so I can’t access it, and trying to contact them is nearly impossible.

I think the only other place i have my credit card entered is Amazon so I have contacted my bank and they thought the best thing to do was cancel the card incase they make any purchases.

I would love to meet these people one day as they would be eating dinner through a straw.

What you describe now is very different to the spam email you were receiving before.
Did you get an email from eBay telling you you changed your password?

 

[phil p]

What you describe now is very different to the spam email you were receiving before.
Did you get an email from eBay telling you you changed your password?

No!
I went to change my password in EBay as when I checked my account they had changed my email into theirs (encrypted) so I eventually got through to them and there had been a number of transactions done by someone in Virginia USA so I’ve frozen the account, checked with the bank again and nothing has come off my credit card, it’s been cancelled earlier this morning so I don’t know what going on.

Also rang PayPal and frozen my account there just incase, plus my emails are acting up now so things are in a real mess at the moment, however I’m a big believer in karma!

 

[Stuart Moffat]

TalkTalk have a poor reputation, but their data security history should have been enough to put them out of business in my view. Their systems have been breached and sensitive customer data stolen (including banking details, most famously in 2015 but they were successfully breached at least twice. Not everyone’s data was stolen on that occasion, and whilst they had no option but to allow anyone whose data had been stolen to go to another internet provider without waiting to the end of their contract. They cynically refused the same for anyone whose data that they said hadn’t been stolen. I’d go elsewhere if I were you.

 

[Cozzer]

No!
I went to change my password in EBay as when I checked my account they had changed my email into theirs (encrypted) so I eventually got through to them and there had been a number of transactions done by someone in Virginia USA so I’ve frozen the account, checked with the bank again and nothing has come off my credit card, it’s been cancelled earlier this morning so I don’t know what going on.

Also rang PayPal and frozen my account there just incase, plus my emails are acting up now so things are in a real mess at the moment, however I’m a big believer in karma!

paulrbarnard's observation is quite right - this is something different to your email problem.
If I wanted to change my eBay password, I'd have to enter my current one.
Unless you happened to use the same password for both email and eBay accounts, how would the villain know it in order to alter it?
Think carefully - have you told anybody, friend/work colleague/relative/whatever - your eBay details?

 

[sometimewoodworker]

I gave up using gmail for anything of any importance when it started deleting stored emails at random - it would sometimes delete stuff two weeks old while ignoring stuff that had been there for years. It has been suggested that maybe I was close to storage limits, but atm the storage is 0.02%GB of 15Gb. The max. was 0.15%GB
I've just looked - it's now deleted everything ever stored.

You should never be using any service that you are not paying money for to store important information.
Any information (mail) that is stored in only one place is totally unsafe, information that is in 2 places is insecure, to have a reliable storage you need 3 storage places and one of them must be geographically separated from the other 2.

You can use gmail to filter and forward mail to any other service.

 

[cowtown_eric]

just listened this am to a radio show that described how the phishers are using AI to generate more convincing msgs, so we've all gotta pay more attn!