If your email account has been hacked you will need to take immediate steps to correct the situation. The first thing you must determine is if the account has been hacked by a stranger or someone that's close to you that wants to spy on you and your private communications. The second thing you need to decide is if you want to catch them or just let them get away with it.
Now if it's just a stranger that has hacked into your account by stealing your password it's likely they only did this to use your email account to send out spam advertisements to people. If this is the case you just need to contact your email provider and follow their step by step procedures to recover you account and change your password. At this point it would be safe to go to all the online accounts you have and make changers to those passwords also.
If the person who has stolen your password and email account is someone who has targeted you specifically to spy on you and invade your privacy you will probably want to catch them in the act and have them arrested and prosecuted. After all someone that has gone to all that effort to stalk you is capable of anything. At the very least you will want to go to court and get a restraining order.
So in this situation the first thing you want to do is go directly to the police and make a report. If the police have the time and recourses they can examine your hard drive, serve your email provider with a search warrant and gather enough information to trace the hacker down and make an arrest.
If your local police don't seem too interested in helping or even act is if they don't believe you then you can hire a private investigator. There are private investigators that can remotely monitor your email account and see if anyone is accessing your email account without your permission. They can recover identifying information about the unauthorized access to your account and reduce that information to a report you can turn over to the police.
In many cases they can get an exact identification of the hacker and provide documented proof of the crime.
Another step is a computer hard drive examination. Sometimes an examination of your hard drive can recover the presence of a key logger or trojan virus and you may even be able to find out an email and password where all your personal information has been sent. Once again this is very damaging evidence.
Once again this information can be reduced to a report that can be used to make an arrest and get a conviction. If you are the victim of a stalker that has hacked into your email account you need to take the correct steps to protect yourself.
Copyright (c) 2011 Opperman Investigations Inc
What Should You Do If Your Email Account Is Hacked By A Stalker
by: Ed Opperman
