If your Yahoo mail account has been hacked, there may be signs of what has happened but it could just be that you no longer get any emails from your Yahoo account as it has been taken over by a criminal.

If you are no longer getting emails to your account, test it by sending a message from another account and see if it gets through to you.

If one of the following is true, then your account may have been hacked:-

• Your Yahoo Mail is sending spam to your contacts.
• You see logins from unexpected locations on your recent activity page.
• Your account info or mail settings were changed without your knowledge.

Criminals can get your password by a number of ways, including:-

• Simply guessing if your password is a common password
• Using a dictionary attack if your password is any word in the common dictionary
• Use a phishing email attack – i.e. they craft messages to you using whatever information on you they can find on the Internet
• Phishing web site – a website that collects your login and password by pretending to be a reputable site

Once they get your login and password, they are likely to use your email account for activities such as: –

• Sending out spam messages to millions of people and you will get return failure messages for many of those
• Sending out scam messages and you may get blacklisted
• Using your account login to guess other accounts and passwords and they click on the forgotten password button so the reset messages come to your account then they can change your password

If you are concerned someone may have changed the settings on your account, then access your mail settings and make sure none of your info or preferences were changed without your knowledge. Things to look for include:

• Email filters
• Sending name
• Email signature
• Reply-to address
• Vacation response
• Blocked addresses
• Default sending address
• Auto-forwarding address

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