Imageshack scam? My account's been deleted

Hello everyone,

I hope I'm posting in the right place.

I upload a lot of images to imageshack.

Recently, I received this email:

Dear Customer,

ImageShack Support and Quality Control Team identified that your ImageShack account is being used for either Business needs or Personal needs with more than 500 uploads per month.

With our growing business we are taking steps to insure availability of our service to free users, subscribers and small business. Effective immediately we are enforcing strict regulations on free accounts and we now require all users uploading more than 500 images per month to sign up for one of our Business Subscription plans.

With purchase of our business plan you will insure that your account and images are backed up on our servers and that our Support and QA teams will treat inquires pertaining to your account with highest priority.

Please protect your accounts with us and help us sustain our business by purchasing the following monthly subscription plan corresponding to your monthly used bandwidth on ImageShack.

Please follow this link to purchase ImageShack Business Subscription: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cm…

Note that failure to respond within 5 business days will result in automatic suspension of your account and unavailability of your files.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Sincerely,


From a Lucy Finegan, lucy@imageshack.net (NOTE THE .NET PART)


I classified it as a scam, gave an ugly reply, and disregarded it.

Now, I received a reply telling me that my account had been deleted, and, sure enough... all the images I'd uploaded to them are gone.

My next best guess is that my account's been hacked.
I cannot recover my password, or log in w the old one.
I contacted imageshack's support, and am now waiting for a response.

Any suggestion is welcomed.

You failed to specify how many image files you are posting per month.

If their statement is accurate, then you are indeed a power user that is taxing their resources.

You must either comply with their requirements for high-volume accounts or try another service that may be more liberal in what you can do considering your upload volume.

Another good service that does not pollute your images with ads is Photobucket.com but I'm uncertain of their volume tolerance.