Someone tried to hack my Gmail account

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Mods – please move this to another forum if it belongs better there.

I had a spam problem in Oct-20 with the Cabify company in Ecuador.  They were sending me what looked like spam, but, on digging into it with help from the (Estonian) founder of Cabify, we discovered that someone had registered on Cabify Ecuador with my Gmail account.  I was assured that my Gmail account would be removed from Cabify Ecuador, and that should be an end to it.

Today came another spam from Cabify Ecuador, then, within minutes, and rather more creepily, an SMS to my mobile in Spanish, the number that I use for 2FA sign-in to my Gmail account.  Creepy!

I have changed my Gmail account password, which also meant changing my app-specific password for Gmail in Outlook 2010.  I have renewed all my Google account saved cookies.

Is there anything else that I can do?  Has anyone else been faced with an attempt to hack their Gmail account?

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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I do something that might avoid the kind of problem you are having.

Because my ISP (Verizon) tends to block emails from colleagues at universities abroad for mysterious reasons of its own, I am keeping a Gmail account as a pass-through, so they can write there and then it gets sent from there to my actual email account. I also use the Gmail address to register with sites where I do online shopping, for example. So there is no need for me to give Google my phone number.

If you did something like this, then you can arrange with your (new?) email provider (other than Gmail, that is) so you can log-in remotely from your phone to your email account there. From some personal experience, some years ago, that only required for me to send my User ID and password.  (Plus a token, for example, if one were using it for two-factor authentication.) You could also setup the spam filter both in your non-Google email account and in Gmail to junk anything coming from this phony company supposedly in Ecuador. And hope you are not hacked again in your new email address, now that you have already changed your password, etc. in Gmail. If that happened, I would mark the new email the malicious messages come from once more to be filtered as Junk — and pray that stops it. I hope this helps.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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ScotchJohn

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Someone is always trying to hack your email, it’s normal. It may be that someone with a very similar email mistyped their registration – which is one of the reasons you get an activation email.

You have done the right things, changed your password, Don’t forget to add an alternative/recovery email to your account as Gmail will send a “login from new IP” message to this account.
Have you received any “new login” emails?

cheers, Paul

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ScotchJohn, OscarCP

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Thank you both, Oscar and Paul.

I was wrong in my original post.  The issue in Oct-20 was with Bolt, not Cabify.  I’m going to assume that some idiot in Ecuador, maliciously or otherwise, has my Gmail address, and is trying to register for cab rides.  When he couldn’t get registered with Cabify this time, he went to try to log in to what he thought was his Gmail, and I got his 2FA SMS, in Spanish.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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