Yes, but you have to take into consideration that if the company was real, they wouldn't be operating locally. They'd be operating remotely. Which pretty much rules the former situation out.

Also, I was convinced that SSL was the de-facto standard for GMAIL and other web-mail services...

As I said in my previous post, it has been reported that the 'hackers' are merely scamming peoples money (as expected) and not delivering the service.

Quite a ingenius scam really. The following link - http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/yourhackerzcom-c141692.html [complaintsboard.com] - suggests that they take your 'hard earned money' and then blackmail you. Saying that they will tell the person you are trying to 'hack' if you don't send them $1000. It made me lol.

I am pretty sure they just utilise the 'recover your password' function, as the spouses/relations probably know what the answers are. I seriously doubt they'd even consider bruteforcing/dictionary attacking Hotmail or the like.... As they have a limited amount of attempts to use. It'd be interesting to see how they'd hack an account with a ridiculously long password like: '>AFD,!21)£"($£$3La57~}{' and with a bogus answer to a secret question. I think not 'YourHackerz'. Also, has the website suffered the wrath of the 'Slashdot effect'?

I really cannot believe that they actually accepted this. I would have burnt it, as it is totally immoral and despicable. Let me tackle a rather (unrelated) fundemental question, despite the fact that he (in)directly killed LOTS of people - Does that warrant the death sentence? If yes, then lets please hang George Bush. If not, then he certainly doesn't deserve this unnecessary humiliation.