It’s not every morning that the first call I get is from Sequoia Capital. Then again it’s not every morning that the first call I get is from Sequoia Capital telling me that my Yahoo email account has been hacked.
For about the past 30 minutes I have received so many calls alerting me to this issue – and some checking to make sure that my family and I really are not in Spain and need them to wire us cash right away so we can continue to pig out on tapas. Thanks to everyone who did their part to fight against this royal, evil pain in the ass.
That said, you can still wire the money to me via PayPal. Got a hankering for paella.
The silver lining here is that I have been looking for a reason to stop using my crusty old Yahoo mail account for years. Hello gmail.
10 Response Comments
I was impressed to see that Google flagged the message with a big red warning. I guess they are learning well about phishing patterns.
On the flip side – I’ve seen this happen to associates with gmail accounts as well.
Still – any excuse to dump Yahoo mail is a good excuse 🙂
Great Post…
lol…hey, you spammed me first.
I totally got one of those emails. Was going to spring into action with a “Tweet to Save Andrew” campaign.
Thank goodness I happened upon this post. I was two seconds away from tweeting you in alarm and/or wiring you 1450 Euro ($1950).
Ok… I guess I can delete this email then. Good to see that you are OK and haven’t been mugged. By the way, I’ve received this very same email almost verbatim from others in the past who have been hacked.
And I’ve been wondering for years why you still used that crusty old Yahoo account.
Suspecting it was a spammer, I got a call from one of senior team last evening to check you were ok regardless. 🙂
A caring, sharing enterprise.
I am still amazed how many people contacted me with offers to help. Really incredible.
Turn on gmail’s two factor authentication and https to help avoid the same issue,
Mark
I also suggest that people add a 3rd account that everything else is forwarded to for checking email on your cell phone. My Gmail account was hacked through my cell phone carrier’s server in China last year, and I realized they automatically spammed via my contact list. Now I have a separate email account for my phone, and I keep no contacts on it, making it much harder for automated hackers to attempt to ransom me out of [foreign country name here]. That said, I’ve seen as many Gmail accounts hacked as Yahoo, but seriously, Andrew, Yahoo is so…1997. 🙂
I had a friend whose account got hacked with the same message i think. They were traveling in Spain and got mugged or something, needed money. Glad it was a hoax. Or hope they made it. ; )