I've been a user of Yahoo's My Yahoo sercvice for many years now. In fact, I remember the day it came out, and I believe I signed up that very day. It is a nice, simple, easy to use portal system and has been my home page for what seems like forever.
In the years that I have used "morpheus" as a nick for both My Yahoo and Yahoo IM, I've had to deal with various attempts to "hack" my account.
For example - in the beginning, a person could request a new password for a My Yahoo account. They could do this upteen times. This would cause a bunch of emails showing up with a random password in each. I would then go through each one figuring out which was the "last" new password and when finally in, I'd reset to my old password.
About three months ago, someone reset the password again, but this time the new password didn't work. I filled out the support form over at Yahoo and was asked to fill out a form and fax it to Yahoo along with a copy of my driver's license. The form asked various questions about my account, all of which I had no problem answering. A few days later, my account was restored.
About four weeks ago, the same thing happaned, and I went through the exact same process. When I didn't hear anything back after a few days, I filled out the help request again. When I got the exact same request for a fax, I responded saying that I had already faxed. Then I heard nothing. So I tried the form again. I explained the situation, and made it clear that if my application was being processed, I didn't mind waiting. Still... nothing. So I tried it again. And again.
This evening, a friend told me he got an IM from morpheus asking him to remove himself since the account had a new owner. I guess Yahoo simply decided to ignore my requests. It would have been nice if they actually told me something. Maybe I'm being silly - getting attached to a nick. The only thing really "private" up on the account was a bunch of pictures of my kids. Still though, it just ticks me off that someone could abuse the system like that.
So, if any of you have 'morpheus' as your IM contact info for me, please update it to 'cfjedimaster.' If you want, give 'morpheus' a hard time. I don't have proof that the new owner is the same person who ruined my account, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't.
Archived Comments
OMG! That makes me furious! i have also given up on my yahoo account, but only because it holds no use, other than to collect junk mail.
but for them to totally disregard your requests, and give the account away, is just rediculous.
I think it might be time to find an open mail gateway, and make the user sorry that he bothered with your account.
ray, im sure you have thought of this, but why not connect to the person, get the ip, or somehow sniff the line and get the ip that you are connected to? if yahoo allows that, and then track the fucker down...
why couldnt you do this?
tw
<cfloop from="1" to="100000000" index="i">
<cfmail to="morpheus@yahoo.com" from="nobody@nowhere.com" subject="foo">
Is your mailbox full yet?
</cfmail>
</cfloop>
Oh geez. Sorry for that, forgot that it escapes code.
Ray -
I feel your pain. The bastard should be drawn and quartered.
sim: The junk email never bothered me. What bugged me is the email service itself. It was added way afgter my.yahoo, and there was no way to turn it off. That's all I wanted - was just to switch it off so I didn't have to worry about cleaning my account. I finally figured out a way to write a filter that would move all mail straight to the trash.
someone hijacked my icq account a couple of years ago. Which is too bad for I used to have a very short 6-digit number way back when not everyone and their son had an instant messenger account. well - things like this happen, I never got my old account back either :-/
I'd be royally ticked if that happened to me. I've had my AIM nick for 12 years now. Fortunately, I didn't pick one as cool as "morpheus". Makes me wonder if "Neo" and "Trinity" got hacked too.
see if you were *really* morpheus the oracle would have told you this was going to happen... ;-)
Looks like the new owner of the account is named "Dan". You can see his fab photos here:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/...
OK, after pondering this a little bit, the answer is simple. If you try to login to the account and fail, it shuts off for a specified period of time right? And the post action could come from any referer, right? Anybody see where I'm going with this? ;-)