I agree with Bob on this. You could have received in your spam box some phishing email and not known about it, but you are putting yourself and others at risk. I would create a new account after talking to aol Fraud dept. Like I said earlier, this happened to a friend of mine and it just got worse once they had their email account because so many things are related to it.
The other thing you can do, is ask aol to keep this account but not make it a master account and change your mail settings to not allow any mail to come in/out for at least 1 - 2 years so you can monitor other activity for possible ID Theft (e.g. see if your friends are getting email from this account while you basically inactivated it).
Also, contact everyone and company associated with this account and change it to a new email account, especially financial institutions (and change your account numbers just in case). You would want to do this quickly as the people behind this are rather quick.
I've been a victim in the past long ago, so I can relate to how this works, but I beat the ones trying to scam me because I was so quick and I'm good behind a PC.
And you have to know what steps to take immediately should such a thing happen to you.
You may also want to not use the aol desktop, which forces you to lower your security settings (allow java, etc.), and instead use the aol web-based instead where you can control more settings and security features. IMO, I would also sign up for a different email account server as well. There are plenty out there that are free and more secure.
