Hire a Hacker sites - legit?

[EDV]

For a couple of hundred dollars they promise they can hack into any email address / facebook account. Is this really possible?
I know of a couple of people that have been locked out of their accounts, not due to hacking , but due to the "security questions" Yahoo and the others use to "confirm" your real identity. Mess up on this questions and that's it, you're locked out of your own legit account. So how do the hackers get past this? Are they scammers pretending to be hackers?
As I write this, I just remembered 3 other people close to me who had their e-mail accounts hacked. It's actually more common that we think. One dead give away is: you get an email from someone in your contacts list, and is trying to sell you something or asking to click on some link. If this happens and you suspect the worst, call that person, don't email. That's how I confirmed the emails were never sent from the person the email account belong to.

 

[Jawa Ex Machina]

I got locked out of my Yahoo mail a few months ago, for stupid reasons.

My account got hacked after I'd clicked one of those links in a spam mail, so then my own email sent out that link to everyone in my contact list.
So in panic, I changed the password to a randomly generated multi-character combination, instead of the word I used for a few accounts (after this, all my passwords are individual per accunt btw).
Problem was, I never wrote down my new password and ended up getting locked out of my own email.

I hadn't changed my security questions in years, and I never give out actual information on them either. I figure anyone can google the town I grew up in or my mother's name.

So I didn't have my email and I didn't know what security question I'd chosen, or the random answer I might have given (or even if it was more than just random letters).

It was still pretty easy to get back into the email. I contacted Yahoo's customer service, and even though I tried for an hour or so to guess the security answers but didn't manage to get them right a single time, I still ended up getting back into my account.

What can I say? They seem to be a good bunch of people working there. Not sure how safe my stuff is guarded, but passwords are never a real protection anyway.

If I were you, I'd tell your friends to try that method. I wouldn't contact a burglar to help me into my house after locking myself out.

 

[Gord.T]

I've had 2 friends get hacked, as a "click here" kind of deal that passes viruses to your hotmail friends. I'm too cautious to be caught but many of my friends have opened the links and got busted down to having to reinstall Windows.
One guy sent me an email apologizing, twice, that he got took and that the virus was passed onto us.
I never opened the link. I was lucky/(or wary enough) to bypass the virus.