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I have joined facebook 2X. each time, e-mail addresses were stolen; what can i do?

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When I first joined Facebook, virus(?) grabbed all my e-mail addresses and sent them e-mail. I unsubscribed and re-joined. Same thing happened. I cannot get any response from Facebook on what to do and I need to use it for business purposes. Can anyone help?

When I first joined Facebook, virus(?) grabbed all my e-mail addresses and sent them e-mail. I unsubscribed and re-joined. Same thing happened. I cannot get any response from Facebook on what to do and I need to use it for business purposes. Can anyone help?

All Replies (7)

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Hi bamagirl,

Have you by any chance opened up any junk or spam mail, as some of these may have malware that will steal your information? Or gone onto any site which impose a risk of a virus .If so this could be on your computer or browser. I would suggest you uninstall your browser and install the browser. I hope this will help.

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Not really a Firefox support issue - Firefox doesn't 'do' email, nor does it store email addresses anywhere except for "form fill data".

What are you using for email? Application on your PC? Or are you using web mail, like with your internet service provider, or something like Yahoo?

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I knew it did not belong to Firefox, but because of my no replies from Facebook, I thought someone might have experienced the same thing. Yahoo on my home PC with internet service provider. Have never experienced this with one other e-mail. Use AVG and Malwarebytes to check every night. Just don't know what to do now. Any suggestions would be better than what I have now. Thanks so much!

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"What are you using for email?"

AVG and Malwarebytes would only look on that PC, which would only 'cover' an email application that you're running on that PC, like Mozilla Thunderbird or similar email program on the PC.

I don't use Facebook, so I don't know what type of exploits may be floating around there.

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Facebook likely has a feature you will find on many sites that they can, with your permission, try to connect you with others you know on the service. They do that by extracting your address book and matching the information with their current membership. I don't know where that list ends up; for all I know Facebook keeps it. But that might not be the source of the problem: did the unwanted emails come from Facebook (for example, promoting itself) or from someone else unrelated to Facebook?

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jscher2000 said

They do that by extracting your address book and matching the information with their current membership.

Where would that address book information be extracted from?

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the-edmeister said

jscher2000 said
They do that by extracting your address book and matching the information with their current membership.

Where would that address book information be extracted from?

Typically by sharing your webmail login; CSV imports are sometimes supported as well. The sites should not be able to reach into offline mail clients without an external executable or maybe some disturbing Java applet.