AOL sending Spam from my address? Help!

Hi,

This has probably been covered before since aol is notorious for problems, but I am majorly confused. The thing is this, last week, I logged into my aol account, to look up a friends' address in my sent folder.

I clicked on it, and had something like 136 sent messages; all spam. Which I of course did not send. Freaks me out. Has my account been hacked? Now, it seems that every time I receive spam, the same sort of messages are generated from my acount, and sent to addresses I've never seen before. People have started to block me, and I'm worried this will affect my 'real' mail. Like I won't notice a real message because I'm dealing with all the crap ones, and the real messages I send aren't being received because there is some unknown bkack mark on my address or something.

Bottom line is, I want to close the aol account (I've already opened a non-aol address, in hopes that my friends will use the new one, so I can phase the old one out. I also plan to swtch the address for my email alerts.) But there may be a problem with this as well.

I'm techically a guest on my mother's account (my address is one of her three free ones, but she has no access to it.) If I close my account will she need to close hers as well? And how do I close mine with doing so from her machine? (We live on different continents, access would be difficult!) And I actually don't have aol, I check my messages from the web site. Any suggestions? I don't think it's covered on the AOL FAQ.

Sorry if this is long-winded, I wanted to explain as fully as possible.

Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. The situation is leading to paranoia.

Thanks for the help!

Lorna