Extracted from: UO FYI (http://update.uo.com/fyi.html) - Sept 16, 2005

"It’s come to our attention that thieves (true scum of the Earth, seriously, just horrible, horrible people) are hacking into email accounts of UO players. Once they have an email address and password, they use that to get a player’s UO account name and password. If you see a password request email in your inbox that you didn’t request, you should immediately change the password on your email account and your UO accounts. Also, for all players, it would be wise to make sure your email addresses have complex passwords involving numbers and punctuation marks. Don’t use a simple password that is easy to guess. Free email services offered by Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail are especially vulnerable so be extra vigilant if you use one of those. Also, you might also use an email address with your UO account separate from the one you use in public. That would make your UO account extra safe."

From Super Administrator of PaxLair.Com.  The best prevention is for you to use your own ISP's email account (not a hotmail, yahoo, netscape, etc.) account for your admin email account for your UO accounts; or use another account obtained in some other manner (set up a secondary email account with your ISP account).  We even advise that you do NOT use your UO Email account on this PaxLair.Com service either, as no public web service is 100% safe (nothing seems to be these days).  Use your hotmail type email account for paxlair.com access and keep your personal email for use with uo.com accounts.  This would just be a safe practice.

Also, never, never give out your UO password or any other password to an usolicited request, like over Email.  Be wary of ANYTHING that asks you to verify your account information for any kind of service.  Most if not all reputable services never ask you to verify account information through online systems.  And again, never ever give out your passwords.