Hackers stole 100,000 of her Aeroplan points. She wants to warn others about how they did it [Video]

Last Sunday, Jacinthe Dupuis knew something was off when she noticed hundreds of emails had flooded her inbox in just a few hours.

All of them appeared to be spam.

After an online search, the woman who lives in Léry, Que., on Montreal’s South Shore, realized that she’d likely been the victim of something called email bombing. It’s a technique used by hackers to overwhelm someone’s inbox with useless emails to take their focus away from the one message they should be paying attention to.

By the time she realized what hackers were up to, it was too late.

Buried in that pile of emails was a warning from Aeroplan, Air Canada’s loyalty program. It was alerting her that changes had been made to her account. When she checked, more than 100,000 Aeroplan points had disappeared.

Someone had already booked a flight from Malaysia to Abu Dhabi, and she had only about 12,000 points left.

“I know …