I’ll give some other helpful suggestions about recovering your Gmail account if it’s compromised…

1. Go to http://www.gmail.com homepage, but don’t sign in. Just click the html link “Can’t access your account?” below the sign-in tab.

2. Select “my account has been compromised”

3. then click on the “account recovery form” link

My advice – simply print that form out and fill it in by hand with a pen the best you can and save it for a rainy day should your account ever be compromised. Fold it up and stick it away somewhere. You’ll thank yourself later because Google throws the kitchen sink at you w/ regard to questions about your account on that form. Make it easy on yourself and write it all out now for your own reference.

I had used my compromised gmail account for 5 years. It was difficult for me to remember some of the information required on the account recovery form – specifically the creation date (month/year) the account was created; the person who initially sent me the gmail invite, etc. It took me about 3 days and 5 unsuccessful attempts to recover my account until I was finally able to piece it all together.

What baffled me is that my password was strong – an 8 character password mixed with letters, numbers, symbols and case sensitive. I have no idea how they phished it. Maybe it was a keyloger virus. I don’t now. My main fear was that perhaps my entire PC files / folders were compromised and vulnerable.

Once I was able to retrieve the account, I was able to get in there and appraise the damage. By that time he had already set up forwarding on my account to an operamail account , deleted all my contacts and continued to email my contacts with similar scams from operamail.

Not fun.