Hacked / Virus :(

[ssc456]

Hey guys,

I'm feeling rather sore right now, sore as in my ego and pride has been hurt. As a computer enthusiast and knowledgable user i never thought i would see the day i would fall victim to some muppet sending our viruses and stealing my information

i logged into my internet banking this morning to discover someone has use my ebay account to purchase a new Blackberry phone over in america (im in the UK).

I'm trying to figure out what happened and recover from it but my guess would be i have fallen victim to a remote key logger. As none of my passwords have changed therefore he hasn;t used a reset password option or antyhing as far as i can tell.

My hotmail has been done, my ebay account and my Paypal account

I say luckily but it's not when you think about it but luckily enough it was only for just over £100. (could have been worst)

Not that i suppose he uses this address often but as a warning when i logged into my hotmail account my emails were being auto forwarded to cpilgrim21@live.com so i'm assuming this is the b3st3rd that is responsible.

Has anyone else been unlucky enough to be done by somehting like this?

Is there anything i can do, legally? i mean i've reported this to Paypal and Ebay and my bank just to be safe, and i'm confident i will get the money back but this just doesn't seem like enough justice.

How do the police handle these matters? my guess is they won't take it too seriously.

Any advice?

 

[OldSchoolPC]

Well, I don't know about the UK, but the only agency that would deal with such a thing here is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). However in all honesty, if it's international there is nothing that you can realistically do about it law-enforcement wise. Just make SURE that your computer is clean before you change all your passwords around or it will happen again. Reinstall windows or call a PC technician to properly irradiate spyware etc..

 

[clacker]

Report it to the police if I was you and you can report his email address so he can't do it to anyone else. At least he didn't do worse.

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Call up both American and UK authorities. Over here, the FBI, CIA, or FCC would probably be your best bets, more so the FBI.

Be sure you change all your passwords, run virus scans, etc.. Of course, you should already know that.

But yes, if you have indisputable proof (example, if you can get a local court to subpoena eBay, hotmail and Paypal to get ISP records) that this is the person that hacked your accounts, the authorities may be able to do something.

 

[berry120]

Report it to the police - if they've taken money it's an outright theft therefore will be treated as a crime. No, they probably won't put serious amounts of man power into resolving it but it's definitely worth reporting. If they can catch whoever it is relatively easily (i.e. if ISPs play ball and the guy's too thick to use a proxy) then they may well get him.

Also, your bank should be able to cover your costs - as long as you report it as a crime and show you took reasonable measures to stop it happening (you didn't write your pin number on your card for instance) then they should refund you the money.

In terms of the email address, it might be him but don't take it as given. He could've put any old email address to get you to think it was someone else.

 

[detox1]

Eventually, this guy will get caught, but only if the victims report the crime. The more info the police have, better the chance they can catch him.

 

[root]

go to the police and report it, get a crime number.

if you have any troubles getting your money back you will probably need that.

 

[ssc456]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for all the advice, i spoke to my bank first a formost for their advice. They said as it was a transaction through ebay and Paypal to dispute it through their process first, which i have done. The bank have canceleld my card and issued me with a new one. Paypal have now, ver quickly in my opinion checked the claim out and approved this as an unathorised transaction. They advised my money will be refunded within the next 5 working days.

I'm very happy with everyones response to this, Ebay / Paypal and my bank, which is a plus.

But as i said it is purely the fustration that there is no motive for people to not do this. I will call the police later and report it and strongly urge they take it forward but i can't see much happening.

As berry120 said it is outright theft, if somebody came up to me in the street and stol £100 from me they would take it alot more seriously but just because it is online it's almost as if there is no punishment??

in terms of passwords and things i've change them on another computer as i've spent the last 3 days trying to back up 1 Terabytes worth of data on various external drives as i'm kind of a believer that once your computer is infected the only way to be sure it's gone is a reformat and re-installation of windows. Some may say this is extreme but better safe than sorry.

 

[Card]

Occasionally those thieves get caught and are punished especially if there was a bigger sum involved, it's not impossible.

Glad you got the thing solved with your bank and paypal