Dear SOFF Friends,

This is to inform you that our ts.morris email address was hacked yesterday and you most likely received a scam letter with the words “Checking In” in the subject line.  Hopefully you realized it was a scam and did not reply.  If you did not reply to the letter your computer should be OK.  The password on this ts.morris email was changed yesterday so it is now useable. 

Many of you contacted us by phone to let us know our email had been hacked so we thank you very much for letting us know.   All our emails up until yesterday afternoon are gone off to the hacker so if you let us know by email during the day we did not receive them.  Only those emails sent to us later in the afternoon were received.  We did receive many phone calls and phone messages which were so appreciated.

I am learning a lot about all this.  Yesterday a computer consultant led me through to “Rules”  under “Settings” in our email account in www.outlook.com  (live.com; hotmail.com; outlook.com are through Microsoft).  And with the consultant’s help, it was found that a rule had been placed on our email account to send all our emails to a fake email account.  I then deleted that rule so the account is now OK to use.  I checked it again this morning and that rule is still gone.  I learned something about this that I had never known.  You might want to check your own email account for any “Rules” in “Settings” to learn how to stop a hacker if you ever have this problem in the future.

Also I had to set up another email account to go through the process of changing the password on the ts.morris email.  That email is one that we can use as well so if you see this email address    burke929487@outlook.com  know that it is from us.

This has been a real nightmare.   This is the first time our computer has been hacked so this is a real learning experience.  We are finding that it has happened to many of you who called so we were advised right away to change the email account password and also all of our other account passwords. 

Thank you again for letting us know about the scam.  If any of you have any helpful advice, please let us know.

Sharon & Tom Morris

P.S.   Duane, are you able to send this off to more of our SOFF Friends.  We are not sure how  many received this scam letter.  Thanks so much.