Help Our G-Mail Accout Has Been Hacked/Including Paypal, All Money Gone/Need Advice

We changed the Gmail settings yesterday and have been in touch with GoDaddy as they took our domains, I sent the info off to them to deal with. Also PayPal sorted things out asap.

Thanks to everyone for their help and support, it's much appreciated.

Dave.

This is horrible...I hope all turns out well Tina and Dave.

And thanks BlueSquares for the reminder. I've been putting off the gmail https option until I read this thread.

Such an easy thing to do that takes less than a minute for extra security on a gmail account.

-Steve

Hi Tina,

I know what you're going through, because the same thing happened with me. I think that I fell for a very convincing PayPal phishing scheme, and foolishly, I was using the same password for my gmail accounts as well.

PayPal initiated their investigation and I got all my money back. They were terrific - there was even a phone number to call, and I had a very positive experience with their phone support.

On the other hand, I have still not recovered my Gmail accounts. Gmail has virtually no support - well, there is a form that you can fill out when your account is 'compromised' - wherein all the questions are canned, they ask things like when was the account created (yeah, right) - who were some frequently emailed contacts (some of my gmail accounts were mostly incoming mail, but important nonetheless), what were some of the labels, was the account created as a result of an invitation and if so, the URL of the invitation, etc. There was no text field to explain the problem in my own words. Seemed like the whole process was done with bots, not with people.

And I got a robotic response back as well - a form e-letter that said I hadnt provided enough information to ensure that the account was mine. So they disabled the account 'to prevent further abuse', but haven't returned it to me - and actually, there were THREE gmail accounts hijacked, not one. The hijacker changed my password, my secondary email, and my security questions.

I've resubmitted a couple of more times and got zero response back.

I had all sorts of private info in my emails, unredeemed gift certificate to Amazon, file attachments that I hadn't yet saved to my hard drive, login info to membership sites, etc. So one thing I did was phone the credit bureaus who put a 90-day fraud alert on my credit cards.

So a few things to know about your gmail account:
> your secondary email address
> frequently emailed contacts
> labels you've created
> last date of successful login
> invitation info if applicable

Anyway, a tough lesson learned.

- Kat