Windows Live account Phishing scam.

Not a day goes by that my junk folder in my hotmail or gmail account contains some kind of phishing attempt or internet scams. There is always unscrupulous people out there who tries to pry your personal information or try to make you believe they are some African country's ambassador looking for someone to help them channel their money.

Although I do feel a bit insulted when receiving this kind of email, there are always the greater fools out there who will fall for their traps and submit to their scams. And these scams unlike your everyday computer viruses, do not just invade Windows machines. They are OS independent! Here is one of the emails I received yesterday in my hotmail account and it goes to show how easy it is that someone will fall for it.

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Hotmail account Hijacked or hacked? Here's how I retrieved it...

Yesterday my wife's hotmail account got hijacked. The account was created more than 10 years ago and at that time, she did not set any alternate email address in case of situations such as this. And worst still, the secret question's answer had to be incorporated with the location in which your account was open under where and when. Email accounts, as we now realize, are actually something very personal which holds many of our personal information (and secrets!) as well as vital information. Also by loosing an email account, imagine all the hassle you'd have to go thru to inform all the other services which you have subscribed to that send to your email account. For e.g. credit card statements, utility bills, stock trading account, social networking accounts (e.g. facebook, twitter, etc.). And loosing this email account may compromise all your other social networking accounts too because they too have password recovery services which sends password reset information to your email account!

What do we do? Well, contrary to the forums on the internet which mostly complaint about the crappy service which they got from Microsoft Live team, we got it resolved within 24 hours (after searching high and low on the internet that is). The people complaining about the service probably did not provide initial information for the team to work on or they are approaching the wrong channel in Microsoft. If you have went to MSN help centre, they will simply ignore you because it was not the right channel.

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