My email acocunt has been hijacked

useruser

New Email
My first post here so hope I've put it in the right place.

My wife’s email account has been hijacked by scammers (in Nigeria from the ISP location in message pathway) and all incoming emails are being diverted to them. Hoping someone can help us get control back.

I have a Dell PC, running Vista and IE9. ISP is AOL and the email account is an AOL one. Email addresses quoted below are not the actual ones for obvious reasons.

Yesterday morning everyone in my wife’s address book started receiving emails that fortunately everyone recognised as a well known scam:

“I'm writing this with tears in my eyes, my family and I came down here to Moldovia for a short vacation,unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed all cash,credit card and mobile phone were stolen off us but luckily we still have our passports with us.
I'll need your help (LOAN) financially of £2,000 ..... [etc]“​

Normally if I get an email from my wife it says “From: alisonjones@aol.... To: myname@aol....” but this one had another line added “Reply To: alisoniones@aol....” where the slight change in spelling – changing the j to an i – was almost imperceptible.

We immediately changed my wife’s AOL Sign On password and AOL security question, within an hour of the scammer emails being sent. Checked my wife’s Sent Mail folder but none of the scammer’s outgoing emails were in it. Also noticed her address book was empty – have since read this is common scammer ploy with these frauds to prevent you sending an email to your address book to alert them to the fraud.

Next thing is we get warned by friends that same message has been posted on my wife’s Facebook page. Immediately changed both the Facebook email address to another one we use occasionally and changed the Facebook Password and logged her out of Facebook.

That’s when we noticed that emails sent to my wife’s correct email address, ie alisonjones@aol...., weren’t appearing in her AOL Inbox New mail folder when we Signed On from our PC. In fact nothing has appeared in the New mail Inbox since the scammers sent out the fake email when usually she gets lots of stuff every day. I’ve sent a couple of test emails but nothing appears. But during today have noticed something odd – could be coincidence – a couple of email have got through to Inbox but every single one was where my wife was a ‘bcc’ addressee

We’re don’t know how the scammers gained control but suspect it was via Facebook and not by a direct attack through the AOL Sign On page (the previous AOL password was “strong”, had been routinely changed about 4 weeks ago, and isn’t used as the password on any other website. Also the unread emails that were in the New mail folder at time scammers sent out the fake email are still there and still unread).

I’m pretty sure my PC isn’t infected. Behaving normally, have done full scans with Norton, Microsoft Safety Scanner, Kaspersky TDSS rootkit utility and Malwarebytes and all found nothing.

Our problem now is how to get back control of the email account so that the incoming emails aren’t being diverted to the scammers? Any suggestions gratefully received.

Thank you for reading - hope wasn't too lengthy.
 
Top