A state lawmaker is warning everyone who got a strange email from him this week that it wasn’t from him.
State Senator Robert Dvorsky’s email account was hacked. The message claimed Dvorsky was in Scotland, lost his wallet and needed friends to send him money. “Well, I could always use Euros, but I don’t need ’em to get back from Scotland,” Dvorsky joked during a telephone interview with Radio Iowa.
Dvorsky is a Democrat from Coralville and he’s in Coralville. Dvorsky’s first clue about the bogus email came when the Johnson County sheriff called. “He actually left a message on my phone at 7:12 a.m. about it a couple of days ago about it, so that was the start,” Dvorsky says. “So it’s good to have friends like a sheriff.”
Dvorsky’s Yahoo account got hacked after he responded to an email asking for his password. “Unfortunately it was one of those things where the header looked like it was Yahoo and all that sort of information and I thought a little bit and thought: ‘Should I do this or not?’ And I should have noted that I had that little suspicion and not done it, but I went ahead and did it and that’s what happened,” Dvorsky says.
Yahoo has locked down that particular Dvorsky email account. Dvorsky says don’t be surprised if you get a scam email that looks like it came from a friend who claims to be stranded in Scotland without money. “A friend of mine from UNI says that he was the fourth person that he’d received that same Scottish scam from,” Dvorsky says. “So it’s really getting out there.”
Yahoo and other companies do not ask for customers’ passwords by email. Dvorsky says his experience highlights the need for a crack down on hackers. “Everything you do electronically, somebody’s out there watching,” Dvorsky says.
The bogus email was sent from Dvorsky’s private account. The state government email account that is alloted to him as a state senator was not hacked.