Not sure what the term is, but yesterday I received a suspicious email from a known friend saying that she was in jakarta attending a close relative and was paying the medical bills but was short 4,000$ and wanted to borrow that from me. I emailed a 'no can help' email and this morning I called her in Hawaii and confirmed that her hotmail account was 'hacked'. is that the correct term??

anyway should I worry about my contacts now being hacked and how can she stop it and how can I prevent it with my free avira antivirus??

Thanks in advance.....

It used to be that a change or password on hotmail was all that was required.

You have nothing to worry about unless you clicked something in that message, your anti-virus cannot do much. Just tell your friend to try the above.

And in future tell her to check links before clicking on them

Hacked is the wrong term - hijacked would be more appropriate.

I received a similar email recently from a friend, and of course I knew immediately it was fake (said friend being a very prominent politician in Africa). It wasn't difficult to sort out and we were able to lock his account then transfer it back to him. Aside from the obvious embarrassment caused by all his contacts recieving said mail, no real harm was done.

Fwiw, I traced the origin of the mail to a Nigerian ISP, although the originating machine could have simply been a zombie...

This was the third time I've seen this particular scam, it's quite popular.

Yep, seen this scam also. Our secretary got an e-mail, allegedly from one of our students, requesting a large sum of money as he was stuck in Africa and lost everything. It looked quite legit even the spoofed return address. Just that none of our students have ever gone to study in Africa and other signs of a scam happening. Just told the secretary to dump and ignore it.

same thing happened to a friend of mine in Ubon, but on his Yahoo email. the contents of message appears similar ($).

Seems to be the popular scam these days, facebook or email account gets hijacked and then requests for money sent to all friends. A lot end up wiring the money over so they will keep on doing it.

Seems to be the popular scam these days, facebook or email account gets hijacked and then requests for money sent to all friends. A lot end up wiring the money over so they will keep on doing it.

Not only by email.. These scammers are going after elderly people via cell phones with the same scam idea. Relative in jail somewhere needs money wired to get them out of jam. Sick b**tards.

my daily connections in Africa are directly connected to shredder and trashbin.

Hacked is the wrong term - hijacked would be more appropriate.

I received a similar email recently from a friend, and of course I knew immediately it was fake (said friend being a very prominent politician in Africa). It wasn't difficult to sort out and we were able to lock his account then transfer it back to him. Aside from the obvious embarrassment caused by all his contacts recieving said mail, no real harm was done.

Fwiw, I traced the origin of the mail to a Nigerian ISP, although the originating machine could have simply been a zombie...

This was the third time I've seen this particular scam, it's quite popular.

Nigeria is also in Africa isn't it?

Your safe from anything provided you haven't clicked on links or tried to log in to something with that link.

Didn't come here to talk about scams, so have a good one.

This happened to me. Unfortunately the mod I sent the mail to didn't reveal his bank details.

Oops did I say that out loud?