provider in trouble?

Has anyone gotten contacted this morning by one of our local providers saying she is out of the country and in a bind? If this is really her I want to help but I obviously am suspicious of a scam...not from her but possibly someone has stolen hercomputer or something.

After doing some investigation it does appear that this is some type of scam

I got the same email from her. She probably opened an email with a virus, which caused all of her contacts to start receiving the spam. I've had that happen to me before. I told her to change her password and I believe that would fix the problem (or at least it did that time for me, I'm not a computer geek).

This is most likely a known phishing scam that has been virally spreading around the internet. It sends an email to everyone in the address book claiming to have had a problem while traveling abroad and advises a need for some financial assistance to be able to return home. If that is the nature of the email you received, it is most likely that a hacker or trojan has gained access to her account and is mass-emailing all of her contacts. It has been happening for the last 6 - 12 months that I am aware of.

Funny.. Even the virus knew better than to contact me needing money for "help". Guess it knew like the women do that I will just basically say "Oh well" and hang up.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I got one of those e-mails a couple of months ago. I had never met the lady, so I just ignored it. We had only exchanged a couple of email well over a year ago. It didn't make any sense that she would be contacting me. Probably was a virus.

If that is the nature of the email you received, it is most likely that a hacker or trojan has gained access to her account and is mass-emailing all of her contacts. Originally Posted by ufriend2912

So does changing her email password usually fix that? I'm not a computer expert, but that's what I advised her to do.

If it is a hacker, probably (but not a guarantee). If it is a virus, it may, but trojans often record keystrokes. She should run a full virus check on her computer regardless.

So does changing her email password usually fix that? I'm not a computer expert, but that's what I advised her to do. Originally Posted by pipefitter73

I saw it. The password change is a good idea but this one indeed looks like the residual of a virus so I suspect it won't help.

I use Avast. She can find it and download the free version online. That may do the trick. There is also a paid version if she still has trouble. I do frequent scans with this and never had a problem. You can set it up to automatically do scans as frequently as you want to. I do them weekly.

http://www.avast.com/en-us/index

A couple of other good free ones - the free versions don't have automatic mode but they do a good deep scan:

superanitspyware.com
malwarebytes.org

You have to remember to update and run them every once in a while.

Be careful out there.