I received a request for money from a "cousin" that said he was in Houston and wanted me to send him money. I ignored it, and to this day, I don't know if it was real or not. LOL I had no contact with him from childhood, and only rarely then, until a few years ago after I made contact with his sister-in-law, the wife of his deceased twin. He mostly worked overseas, and he was obviously a heavy drinker and liked to call me to talk about family when he was three sheets to the wind. One day he called just to tell me he had found out I was Mormon (like that was a secret), and how he felt about that. Well, you can attack me on a lot of battlesfields, but if you're going to try that one you better bring a big gun and be armoured up. LOL He would call about once a month for a couple of years. The last conversation, he said he had cancer and asked me to prayer for him. (Who, me, a Mormon?) Of course I did. When the msg came, there was no explanation, nor anything to indicate that it was really him. My husband said, "Send it if you want to". I said, "Not in this lifetime". I still don't know. Was it him? Did he really need help? Did he die and some one got the info from an obit or on-line. It wasn't his normal way of contacting me and he wanted the money sent Western Union to an address I had never heard of. Although he lived in Texas, I don't think he lived in Houston at the time. Who can you believe? Maybe very few!!

This email looked like any other I would get from a friend. That's the problem, nothing suspicious at all about it and I'm always pretty alert having been trained by the very best in the business. It was not spam, it was much worse than that. The purpose was "phishing" to collect personal information and target us for fraud.

Hi, Molly You said, "I'm not ignoring the fastmail.fm one, but I think having the .fm suffix will be a problem for this un-computer-savvy person." I don't use Fastmail myself, but many do and like it a lot. (It's based in Australia, I believe, as is bluebottle.com.) Anyway, Fastmail actually is known for having loads of other domains that you can use when you sign up for an account. Check out point #3 at the following site: http://fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/General.htm#OtherDomains I think "cluemail.com" is one of the more popular of Fastmail's alternatives. Just fyi. :-) Scott

There is a HUGE difference between someone gaining access to your email and your computer being compromised. You haven't provided any evidence that your computer is hacked. You have provided evidence to the contrary since you scanned your computer and didn't find anything. Also, if your computer has been hacked, the hacker probably isn't interested in using anything that is actually on your computer but is interested in using your computer to do other malicious things or monitoring your keystrokes to get passwords to financial accounts. Deleting files on your computer isn't going to prevent any of that (assuming your computer has been hacked). People keep many gigabytes of crap on their computers, hackers aren't going to rummage through all of those files in hopes of finding some valuable morsel. Unless you are a prominent person who is known to have classified documents or something like that on your computer, in which case you might be targeted for the data on your computer.