In the recent past, three of my friends have had their Yahoo! mail accounts cracked into by the bad boys of the cyberspace. The first victim, sometime in November 2007, was Noel Jambo who works for Bunda College of Agriculture, a constituent college of the University of Malawi. The guys who cracked into his account sent the following email to his contacts:
Hello,
I am sorry i didn’t inform you about my traveling to Africa for a program called Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria. It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i found myself is very intoxicated for me to explain.I am really stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my little bag in the Taxi where my money, passport, documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am in a very bad situation here because i have no money with me. I am now owing the Hotel where am staying the sum of $1550 and they wanted me to pay the bill soon or else they will seize my bag and hand me over to the Police, i need your help very urgent to enable me return back home successfully without any harm, I am in a terrible and tight situation here don’t even have money to feed myself for a day i had been starving so please understand how urgent i needed your help,i want you to help me with the sum of $3300 to sort out my problems here but if you are not too buoyant do not have all the $3300 i will also appreciate what so ever you can afford to send me for now and i promise to reimburse the money to you once i get back home without hitch delay i have been to the high Commission and they promised me a new traveling Documents for my safe returning back home. look for a Western Union Money Transfer Local stores around you and send me the money to the receiving information below.
Receivers Name:Noel Jambo
Address: Ekko Hotel And Suites, Victoria island,
City: Lagos
Zip Code: 23401
Country: NigeriaAfter you have sent the money email me the western union transfer details such as:
MTCN 10 digits(Money transfer control Numbers)
Test Question: To whom
Answer:Noel
Amount Sent…Thanks in advance for your help while waiting to hear back from you with the transfer information.
Regards
Noel
When I received this email, I did not even bother to find out the whereabouts of Noel and how I could assist him because I knew that some Internet thieves were at work. How would Noel say he has travelled to Africa while he lives in Malawi which is in Africa? Before you start acting on requests such as these, I would like to advise you to Google some of the phrases in the email. In most cases, the links that you get on the first page of your search results will clearly show that it is the work of scammers.
The second victim was Chomora Mikeka just last month. The nature of the message that was sent out by his impersonators was very similar to Noel’s.The only difference was that in his case they purported him to be stranded in United Kingdom. But at that time, Chomora was in Yokohama busy with studies. The third victim, just two weeks ago, was Bola Oluyemi, a very good blogger friend of mine. A Chinese wholesaler (or their agent) impersonated her and sent out some adverts to her contacts.
These bad boys cannot crack into other people’s mail accounts like this without knowing their log in details.Therefore, these developments expose a security flaw in the Yahoo! mail system.The guys at Yahoo! must fix this problem as fast as they can otherwise an exodus to gmail is looming.
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12 users commented in " Yahoo! mail, what’s up??? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThat’s a very common scam. I receive a couple of these mails per day. I don’t even bother opening them. But I did fall for a false login screen once. It was morning, I was having my coffee barely awake and it seems that Yahoo Messenger didn’t want to log in requesting the password again. Being almost asleep, I logged in again. After 2 minutes, a thought crossed my mind, I ran as fast as possible to check it and indeed, it was something else, not Yahoo, and I changed my password fast!
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I do not believe Yahoo has a security problem.I have been with yahoo for years without any problem.
I have seen such mails sent from my the accounts of my friends.
On one good day invited my friend,Tony for Braii
Just before we started i checked my Yahoo mail box .I had no new messages.
We finshed braii, and got into the house and i saw a new message from my Tony.Tony had no knowledge of writing any email to me .
The email was saying, he was in Nigeria , and in need of money as he had lost his money and passport.It puzzeled me as my friend was in my house.
My friend Tony tried to log into his account and failed as the password had been changed.He had to do a lost password request inorder to log in.
Tony then discovered that all the people in his Yahoo address book had been sent a simmilar messages ,89 people including his wife
To unlock the puzzel ,i then asked Tony if he had given his password to anyone online.
That was the issue because Tony had responded to an email from ‘YAHOO’ saying he should update his account information or else the account will be closed.He gave all his details .These guys had reproduced yahoo website ,but i had their website address.
Anyone would have given them security details as it looked so genuine.
A close look to that ‘yahoo’ site revealed that some aspects of it including the logo were not in the proper postions.
This is how Tony lost his password.
I believe these guys in Malawi lost their passwords in the same way.I believe Yahoo is fine
The only issue here is for people to guard their own passwords.Yahoo will never ask you for your password
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Roll top desks, most web browsers now come with phishing detections. Yes, these type of scam emails are getting old. They might seem more realistic since they are coming from your friend’s email account. I guess there are people falling for it everyday, otherwise, they would have stopped these emails already.
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This is embarrassing. I have to tell that my friend has yahoo email, and she has constant problems with that. I usually use gmail, but a few weeks ago I created a yahoo one for a side project, and because I was curious. There is no security problem yet, the only thing that I don’t like the attachment process.
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Great info,i think i should change my password fast!
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I had read an article that show you can write email with any e-mail address. But the header always show the real thing.
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Hey
I have heard of two people withthe same problem. The first one was this Malawian in Taiwan or Japan and and lately a friend from Fiji.
The problem may not be yahoo security indeed but the issue is that it damages your reputation espcially to bosses and prospective clients and partners. It is bad especially when it comes to people that are not very converant with this hacking and Phishing and scam thing…who usually happen to be elsder people and who in turn happen to be bosses or prospective employers or business patners It is really bad!
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perhaps the solution is never trust an email from anyone, including Yahoo who asks for your email detail (password, etc). I personally don’t believe that Yahoo! will ever ask for our password by sending an email to us.
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I wish I had seen this post before now, i would have love to add a link back to it in my recent post where I relate the story of how a Nigerian company would have been defrauded. The email in question was a yahoo mail too. It is a good thing that you posted this details here for others to learn from.
If you don’t consider it spamming, here is the link http://naijaecash.com/email-intercepted-and-bank-details-changed-real-scam-story/
else, you can delete it.
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I agree with the other guys’ views! In my opinion, Yahoo Mail is not having a problem. What one needs to stay safe online is to always know what he/she is doing. Filling unsolicited online forms and clicking on the many suspicious and coercing pop-up messages is a recipe for this kind of impersonations. Let alone replying to spam mail. Online Security 101? I have used Yahoo mail since 1998 and it has ‘faithfully served’ me very well. Now of course with the new trend, I am also enjoying Gmail. Of course, Yahoo’s sign-seal security technique is also great.
Cheers!
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me on my side so many times i received mails from diferent peoples or sama bt changed name ask for help to tranfer money from their acccount to mine,ithink yahoo have to be carefuly
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my three accounts got hacked while i was online in YM. after i got hacked for the first time i hav always used fake ids for security reason.
perhaps somebody sent me some instant message & when i replied he used some log from it to hack my account.
this is too bad!
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