[Scam email] I’ve been Hacked email sent from my account!

Dear Lakeisha Priya Sanghera

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft Community.

I understand that you are receiving ransom emails in your mailbox and that this seems to be sent from your account to yourself.

We've gotten a lot of feedback from users about this Pegasus email. This is a recent scam email from a scam group targeting many users.

First of all, don't worry, they don't have any of your private information. They use the same tactics to intimidate many users. The descriptions are exaggerated to try and scare you.

You can enhance your account by following my suggestions below.

The first thing you can do is view your account's recent activity history. If there is no record of a successful login from an unfamiliar address. Then you can be sure that the hacker has not succeeded in breaking into your account at all. They are just using some kind of trick to mimic your email address and send you emails.

If there are unknown login records. Whether it succeeds or fails. You can change your password. You can also add Microsoft Authenticator to your phone, a free app that helps you sign in to all your accounts just use your fingerprint, face recognition or PIN. Authenticators are more secure than code. But please add at least two or more authentication methods anyway. It will be more secure.

About Microsoft Authenticator - Microsoft Support

You can save your 25-bit recovery code with the screenshot guide. This will increase the security of your account.

I hope that my reply will be helpful to you.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further updates, thanks.

Best Regards,

Simon - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

got the same email dont be worried its a scammer.

Got the same email today! My question is, if they don't have access to my email account, how can they send me a mail from my email address? So that means they have hacked my account?

Hi Simon, team,

I received the very same email this morning and its very scary. I have changed my password and secured my account with the authenticator app in addition to phone + email authentication.

When checking my account login history, I can see over 1000+ unsuccessful attempts to login from various countries. While I understand the attempt was unsuccessful, I am very scared as the email received is from exactly the same email address "removed ******@hotmail.com". I've checked that there are no spaces. Is there anything else I need to do to secure my account please? How is this hacker able to send emails from my own account if the login attempt was unsuccessful?

Cheers,

Riddhima

Dear Riddhima Minocha

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft Community.

You can hide your original account name by changing your primary alias so that hackers don't know what you're logged in as now. So the hacker will get stuck at the Enter Account screen and won't be able to reach the Enter Password or Security Verification screen at all. It won't try to log into your account and show a failure.

• Add a new alias, change this alias to the primary alias. You can add aliases through this link. Add or remove an email alias in Outlook.com - Microsoft Support Notes: Do not delete your original alias.
• Uncheck the original account name in the sign-in preferences so that when you log in using your original account name it will say this account could not be found (The fact is that the account doesn't cease to exist, it's just hidden), so that hackers can't attack using your original account name. But you will have to log in using your new primary alias as well. So you may want to keep your new account name in mind. You can take a screenshot and save it.

Since the recent activity shows that the hacker did not succeed in logging into your account. There is no need to worry too much according to. They just used a special cheat to mimic your email. It looks like you sent it to yourself. In fact, it's not.

I hope that my reply will be helpful to you.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further updates, thank you.

Best Regards,

Simon - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist