Scary

I had an interesting situation. I checked all my email accounts on Wednesday and didn't look at them until Sunday. All of the sudden, I couldn't access one account I've had for years and years. Was it possible I forgot my password after all this time? I didn't think so, but maybe. So I do that whole "I forgot my password" thing.  It didn't work. I couldn't access my account. Was it possible that someone got access to my account? Well, yes, it's possible. Admittedly, the password to my hotmail accounts aren't all that difficult. They are pretty much my throw away accounts. These are the addressed I give out if I sign up for something that might have a lot of spam. But my log in name is unusual and I never really thought that anyone would put enough effort to figuring out my account.

Um, I was wrong. 

Someone did access my account. To top it off, they also accessed my ebay account (from which I have bought exactly 1 thing). I am not sure if they got my e-mail from my ebay account or my email from my ebay account, either way, bad things happened. When I finally got access to my account (I had to go thru and describe all the things in my account for them to believe me, which makes sense) there was a letter that my ebay account had been suspended for inappropriate activity. Now, you all know, despite protestations, that I am a decent person (okay, maybe a bit of a goody two shoes in some ways) and would never do anything that would ban me from ebay. But low and behold, there was that big alert on my account. It's kind of scary to see that.

After emailing ebay, I found out that someone had been sending out messages trying to get people to buy things off-line. The messages look as if they were in an asian language (I can not tell the characters apart). There were no bids or purchases on my account. The ebay people agreed that my account had been compromised and gave me full access again. So that's all cleared up (after a few emails) and now I am back to a fully functioning internet user. 

Now I have to figure out what else the people might have had access to. It doesn't look as if they read any of the emails I received while they had access (all emails in that time period were unread) but who knows about previous emails. Sigh, this is going to be fun.

So, if you got anything in the past few days from chezzapg @ hotmail.com and it was rude, it wasn't me. Sorry!