<Sent to Dunkirk NY Observer>

Mr. D'Agostino,

It may be of interest to your readers who have Yahoo email accounts to be made aware of the fact that these accounts are being hi-jacked. Further when the account holder realizes that the account has been hi-jacked they cannot depend on Yahoo customer service to do anything about it.

My email account at Yahoo as well as my ebay account were hacked on July 27th. With the assistance of ebay live help I was able to regain control of that account within a few hours.

My Yahoo mail account is a different story. I have sent over thirty emails to yahoo customer care and the only responses I have received are computer generated auto replies. Each one says that if the auto reply does not solve the problem to reply to it and leave the subject line as it was so that customer care could track it.

I have never gotten a reply. A telephone call to Yahoo resulted in a "service representative" informing me to email customer service.

When this person hacked my account they changed information on it so that I couldn't regain control of it, nor could I cancel it. The "service representative" could not help me because the zip code I gave her did not match the one listed on my account. The hacker had changed the zip code.

Now that the hacker has control of the account it could be used to send bogus emails to anyone. My only protection is that I have retained all of the emails I have sent to Yahoo since this began.

People who have Yahoo mail service should be made aware that using Yahoo to store email as files may result in there loss, or there being compromised. This is not an isolated incident. Let me draw your attention to a website [url]WWW.supportsentry.com[/url] . There I found hundreds of people nationwide with similar stories, both of accounts being hi-jacked as well as no support from Yahoo customer service.

Yahoo Mail service is free, and in this case worth what I paid for it; nothing. Yours, Randy