My friend spammed me using Yahoo! Messenger

A few weeks ago, I was shocked to receive an IM from one of my friends who is on my Yahoo! Messenger List, inviting me to visit a site that sold 'lesbian videos and photographs.' Anyone would be shocked. Especially, if you receive it from a girl, who you think is straight and is sensible enough not to visit porn sites. I imed back immediately, asking her if she is out of her mind. She did not reply and the IMs with a link to one of the porn sites started pouring in. Every day, when I open my Yahoo! Messenger, there would be at least 10 to 20 Offline Messages from her. All had the same text, all had the same link!!

Finally, I got tired of this bloody game and called her up. Poor girl! She had no clue what was happening. We made a few calls to some of our friends to see if they received messages like I did from her. Everyone did! And they chose to ignore it, because unlike me, they knew it was spam and she could do nothing about it. One of our friends, asked her to change her password. No, that didn't work. The menace continued. She tried changing password several times, desperately. No luck.

That was when one of our techie friends came up with this idea. If the issue isn't solved even after she has changed her password, then the troublemaker might be operating from her system itself. What if a Spamming Programme or a Spyware is planted in her system and it has taken control of her Yahoo! Messenger? She uses a computer in her office often to access Yahoo! Messenger. She is logged in most of the time to Yahoo! Messenger, even if she is not actually using it, as the office computer is on through out the day. What if a spyware or a bot planted in her office computer was making most of this opportunity. So, our Techie friend asked her to uninstall Yahoo! Messenger and reinstall it. She did that and more. Scared, she reformatted the whole computer before installing Yahoo! Messenger again. Thank God! Her Yahoo! Messenger doesn't advertise lesbian sites any more. And I don't get those funny IMs from her.