John C.
Senior Member
First time for everything and I consider myself to be pretty fair a this technology stuff, but I got bit this morning.
I've been getting tons of junk email telling to me log onto and confirm my settings or something like thank you for your order or we appreciate your donation but need you to give us some information about your self.
This morning the wife got an email from Verizon wanting to know if I had ordered 8 iPhone 12's. I ignored it at first but something struck me as odd. I thought I remembered something confirming changing my password on Comcast. We went to a Verizon store and asked about the email and the cell phone call that was on voice mail at this point. The people there said the number was good for them and the call was legitimate. They couldn't do anything and said we had to call the phone number. Sure enough, it was all true. The lady on the line said someone hijacked my email and then logged into my Verizon account and tried to order the phones. We squared that away and had to change a pin number on the home connection to clear that out. Next when we got home, I called Comcast and started an incident report. I talked to another nice lady who walked me through the checks. Now I usually use my cell phone for email, but there is provision to handle all email on the Comcast web site. She walked me through a lot of windows and places and we finally found what happened. Someone got into my web page account and changed my email to automatically forward to another email address. I have no idea how they could have gotten my password. I manually input each time I enter a web site and all my accounts have different passwords. There may have been an on line add for business accounts that gave a pin number for one of my connections and the jerk used that pin number to try to order the phones. Now here is another head scratching part. The email is set up through Comcast in my wife's name and two factor identification is turned on there. Since I am a secondary account, I didn't know that it was available on my account. At any rate the rouge email address is gone, email forwarding is shut off and two factor ID is now set up on my account and two companies are investigating the perpetrators. Probably some prince in Nigeria with a new slant. That many smart phones is sure to make this a felony attempted fraud but then again, law enforcement won't care. I asked both of the representatives if there was anything that I could have done to prevent this. The Verizon lady said not much if anything at all. The Comcast lady was surprised that I hadn't been alerted to two factor ID.
No I have to inform my current active clients that ten hours of email were rerouted and then I have to work at changing passwords on all my sensitive accounts. Not something I needed to happen at this point in the year. Hopefully the damage is limited and this makes a decent cautionary tale.
I've been getting tons of junk email telling to me log onto and confirm my settings or something like thank you for your order or we appreciate your donation but need you to give us some information about your self.
This morning the wife got an email from Verizon wanting to know if I had ordered 8 iPhone 12's. I ignored it at first but something struck me as odd. I thought I remembered something confirming changing my password on Comcast. We went to a Verizon store and asked about the email and the cell phone call that was on voice mail at this point. The people there said the number was good for them and the call was legitimate. They couldn't do anything and said we had to call the phone number. Sure enough, it was all true. The lady on the line said someone hijacked my email and then logged into my Verizon account and tried to order the phones. We squared that away and had to change a pin number on the home connection to clear that out. Next when we got home, I called Comcast and started an incident report. I talked to another nice lady who walked me through the checks. Now I usually use my cell phone for email, but there is provision to handle all email on the Comcast web site. She walked me through a lot of windows and places and we finally found what happened. Someone got into my web page account and changed my email to automatically forward to another email address. I have no idea how they could have gotten my password. I manually input each time I enter a web site and all my accounts have different passwords. There may have been an on line add for business accounts that gave a pin number for one of my connections and the jerk used that pin number to try to order the phones. Now here is another head scratching part. The email is set up through Comcast in my wife's name and two factor identification is turned on there. Since I am a secondary account, I didn't know that it was available on my account. At any rate the rouge email address is gone, email forwarding is shut off and two factor ID is now set up on my account and two companies are investigating the perpetrators. Probably some prince in Nigeria with a new slant. That many smart phones is sure to make this a felony attempted fraud but then again, law enforcement won't care. I asked both of the representatives if there was anything that I could have done to prevent this. The Verizon lady said not much if anything at all. The Comcast lady was surprised that I hadn't been alerted to two factor ID.
No I have to inform my current active clients that ten hours of email were rerouted and then I have to work at changing passwords on all my sensitive accounts. Not something I needed to happen at this point in the year. Hopefully the damage is limited and this makes a decent cautionary tale.
