possible computer scam....help !!

[dave53]

hi falcon took me all night but it was genuine found a route in by giving hotmail my daughters e,mail they sent me a link so i could change my password and it opened my account spent rest of the night unsubscribing to mail i never asked for so all is ok by the looks of it regards dave

 

[ged]

... opened my account spent rest of the night unsubscribing to mail i never asked for so all is ok ...

No, it is not all OK.

NEVER reply to, respond to, click links in spam. NEVER give any information to spammers in any way.

The spammers probably bought your email address from some other scrote, along with millions of other addresses. The scrote who sold it probably made most of them up, so the scrotes who bought them had no way of knowing which were genuine and which were not.

By unsubscribing to mail you didn't subscribe to in the first place, you have confirmed to the scrotes that your address is genuine. They will now sell it.

The correct way to deal with spam is

1. Filter as much as possible using junk mail filters, so that you never even see it.

2. Report any that gets through the filters to the responsible ISP. It is not always easy to know where to report it, see link below.

3. Bin it.

Here is an outfit which you can send all your spam to. It's where I send mine. They will report it to the right place for you.

http://www.spamcop.net/


Just to repeat the warning:

NEVER RESPOND TO SPAMMERS. DO NOT CLICK ON "UNSUBSCRIBE" LINKS IN MAIL TO WHICH YOU DID NOT SUBSCRIBE, THIS JUST CONFIRMS TO THE SPAMMERS THAT SOMEBODY WILL READ SPAM THAT THEY SEND TO THAT ADDRESS, SO IF YOU RESPOND YOU WILL JUST GET MORE OF THE CR@P.

 

[sandbender]

I have a hotmail account and a few others from other providers. By far and away the best provider (IMHO) are google, the web interface is much cleaner and spam is kept to a minimum. They also seem to make real efforts to prevent folks from taking over your account, often pointing out to me that someone (me) has been logging into my account from different countries.

What may be particularly handy for you would be their facility to download you existing and future emails and contacts from hotmail, something that makes the transition a little easier. You should of course keep your hotmail account and use it for filling in web forms or making purchases on the internet.

https://accounts.google.com/SignUp

 

[pteron]

I've used gmail since the early days and agree with sandbender - it's a much better interface for me at least.

One new anti hijacking scheme they have is two factor authorisation. You log in with your user name and password but it then asks for a second secret - I have an app on my iPhone that generates a new key every couple of minutes and this number is used as the second secret. You can tell it that your computer is good and shouldn't be queried again for 30 days, but any new computer that tries to access your account will be required to give the second secret immediately. This makes the system far more difficult to hijack and is useful on your main email account.