My email account was hijacked to day 25 Feb 2013.?

[john]

My email account was hijacked to day 25 Feb 2013. A letter was sent to all my contacts telling them I was stranded in Manilla ( spelling), Philippines and I was broke and needed money urgently. There were a number of spelling errors in the story.
I am able to access my email account but all messages and contacts have been deleted. I have changed my password and checked my backup account is correct and valid.
my compromised email address is xbrannan@yahoo.com.au . I can be contacted on my other account: xbrannan@bigpond.com
We followed the Yahoo link for the return of my mail inbox plus my many email contacts. ALL Addresses are missing.
Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do

[Kittysue]

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
- Go to Options > Mail Options > POP & Forwarding to make sure your emails are not all being forwarded to someone else'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. They will be getting an email from the scammer claiming to be you needing to borrow money for some emergency
- if you used your same username and password for ANY other site, you need to immediately change all of those accounts. Unfortunately 80% of people use the same username and password for everything. Hackers know this and once they know your 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