What Can You Do If Your Yahoo Account Is Hacked?

If you live outside the United States, the answer is, sadly, not a lot.  Last month an associate of mine had this problem. He is not very tech savvy so I did the best I could to assist him. He managed to get back into the account. Right, change the password as a matter of priority, I said. Did he? A short time later I heard from him again, this time we could make no progress, so earlier this month, on my birthday no less, he phoned me and asked me to come over and sort it in person. 

I obliged, but it was clear we could make no progress so eventually we had to resort to the Yahoo premium helpline. Did I say help? They were not much. The account appeared to have been totally deleted, although at some point he told me his son had been receiving adverts for porn sites from the address. Yahoo said it may take some time to solve the problem, like over the coming weekend. The net result was that they sent a link and an access code to his Gmail account. The link didn’t work, neither did the follow up. I drafted a letter for him to send snailmail to the CEO. Last time I did that was when my Facebook account was closed after  a false complaint by two malicious females in Northern Ireland. It was several weeks before I was allowed back in.

Someone else I know, albeit slightly, had a similar problem. I realised this when I received an e-mail asking me for help. I recognised the spiel, a hacker breaks into an account, mails its contact list asking the recipients to make an untraceable purchase for him. I didn’t want to reply to this hacker, so contacted a mutual acquaintance who gave me his phone number. He told me he was aware of the problem but had not yet been able to get back into his account – which was not a Yahoo account. One thing he hadn’t noticed was that someone had set up a fake Facebook account in his name too. Before contacting the mutual acquaintance I looked him up on Facebook  and was surprised to see he had only one Facebook friend. When I told him this he replied as I expected that he was not on Facebook adding that he had never been on it. To date, I have reported this fake account three times but it has still not been closed.

Hackers come in all flavours and some of their antics are impossible to guard against. Many years ago I noticed two strange transactions on my bank statement: a furniture purchase in Saudia Arabia and a currency transaction in Australia. I have never visited either country.  I did not have an on-line account so how they accessed my details I have no idea. This month, two people from Indianapolis were given relatively lenient prison sentences for a large scale identity theft.  This was an inside job involving postal theft, but hackers use all manner of sophisticated scams, including phone calls.

While it is impossible to guard against all hackers you can improve your security immensely by using two-step identification. If like me you use only a desktop, linking your main e-mail address and financial accounts to that particular machine makes it almost impossible for someone to steal your money or anything else. If you also use a mobile phone – like 99% of the people on this planet – it is best to keep as little sensitive information on it as possible; do not link your main e-mail address to it unless you really have to.

As for Yahoo, they need to shake up their helpline service, especially for non-US residents.