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Since the launch of this blog 6-7 months ago, I have written several critical posts on Yahoo! and it’s properties. Last week, I had a new experience with Yahoo! that I am hoping will never happen again. On Tuesday of last week, I tried to login to my Yahoo! Mail account and was denied. I proceeded to go to the page where I can reset my password, but it would not allow me to do that either as I got an error message saying that my physical mailing address did not match up with their records. Hmmm, interesting. I thought maybe Yahoo! Mail were having issues and I just left it alone for the day.
On Wednesday, I tried to login again and once again no dice. I tried the reset password page again and again I got the error message that said what I typed in as my address was not what they had in their records. I then went into their help section and tried to figure out what else I could do. After reading many total useless pages, I finally just went into their contact us and filled out a form telling Yahoo! what had happened and asking them for some assistance. I gave them two other email addresses since I could not login into my Yahoo! Mail. Wednesday came and went and I never heard back from them.
Thursday, I was just too busy with some work stuff and just did not even bother with Yahoo! other than just trying to login and once again it did not work. Finally on Friday, after still not being able to login, I tried one last ditch effort. I found within Yahoo!’s pages that there was a way to reset your password if you had ever used a credit card with Yahoo! before. I decided to give it a shot and bam, I got back into my Yahoo! Mail account. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that MY Yahoo! Mail account was not mine anymore….
Somehow, someway, my Yahoo! Mail account had been hacked. Someone changed the name of the account as well as my mailing address which is why I could not reset my password. Even worse, my dear old hacker went through some old emails I had and found information on an account I had on Ebay. The hacker then proceeded to login to my Ebay account and starting bidding and buying like it was Christmas time.
So a great deal of my time this weekend was spent trying to clean up this mess, cancel accounts, change passwords and freeze my credit to ensure that my identity was not stolen as well. Oh by the way, never heard or received back any type of communication from Yahoo!.
Now here is my question, Yahoo! offers the web email free of charge, but even if it is free, don’t they have to have some sort of customer service especially when it comes to situations like this when my account was literally stolen from me and time is of the essence? We are seeing more and more that web companies are willing to give away a great deal of stuff in return for our time and attention on their web sites. What kind of responsibility do these companies take on when they give away things for free?
Oh by the way, I sent an email directly to Jerry Yang about this incident, did not hear back from him either.
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Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, help section, hacked, Ebay
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The other question is, what would Hotmail, Gmail or any other FREE email service be willing to do in a similar situation?
It’s certainly not the best answer, but “free” has certain connotations. The first of which is sadly, “you get what you pay for.” It would be fantastic if Yahoo offered some type of enhanced fraud protection. I’m guessing they might have even weighed this out as a business decision and decided that it wasn’t worth pursuing on a free service.
So…other than LOVE (ya Hippie bastard), I’d be curious to know what else is free that satisfies needs completely? My guess is the list is shorter than you think.
BTW, if you’re wondering who charged the life-size Homer Simpson replica to your PayPal account, I’ll take the 5th.
Shouldn’t it be “Yahoo and Me”?
Cheap - You know I struggled with that.. I had it me and then I changed it to I. Wasn’t sure which one was right.
Jeremy,
I totally agree with you that free comes with some limitations, but when it comes to something like email, you are talking about a person’s private information; address, telephone number, credit cards, etc. There has got to be some level of responsibility, no?
Possibly.
But again, do Yahoo’s competitors fair better?