Yahoo email hacked. reported to Yahoo but now all my contacts and Sent have been deleted. Help!?

[Michelle]

This is actually a friend's Yahoo account. She was hacked and everyone in her contact list was sent spam asking for money. Many of those contact her and reported the spam to Yahoo. She has been trying to change her password for the past few days, today went into her account and found all her contacts and sent items were deleted. How can she get these back and how can she change her password? Should she assume that the account is still being hacked or that Yahoo has frozen it or...? Please help.

[Kittysue]

If she can still access her account, this tells how to change her password
If she cannot access her account she needs to recover her password here https://edit.yahoo.com/forgotroot/
Then Fill out a Mail Restore form ASAP http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/cl...store.html you only have 48 hours to restore lost mail
Fill out a Contacts Restore http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/contact...store.html

Also do all of the following to protect your privacy and identity
- Go to Options > Mail Options > POP & Forwarding to make sure your emails are not all being forwarded to the hacker’s address
- make sure the alternate email address is still yours and you have a security question and answer set
- until you get your Contacts back find some other way to reach them - Facebook, twitter, text, etc -- to inform them that your account was hacked.
- if you used your same username and password for ANY other site, you need to immediately change the passwords on ALL of those accounts. Unfortunately 80% of people use the same username and password for everything. Hackers know this and once they know your Yahoo email login they'll try those same details on Facebook, Paypal, Twitter, Linkedin, Amazon, EBay, every major bank and credit card company, etc to try and hack those accounts as well
- if your emails contained ANY financial information (Paypal receipts, online banking statement, credit card bills, et) you need to IMMEDIATELY inform these institutions. You will have to freeze your bank and credit card accounts and get new account numbers and cards sent to you. Set up a new email address to change your Paypal account. These hackers will go through all of your emails to see if there is anything they can use to steal your money and identity
- also consider filing a fraud alert with the credit bureaus -- read the FTC website http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/id...mised.html

You didn't get an email recently that looked like it was from Yahoo asking you to verify or update your account, or that your account had exceeded its limits, or that there was suspcious activity did you? That was not from Yahoo, that was a phishing scam