Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Hacked,Jacked and feeling out of whack

You hear about it every day. Some poor, naive person responds to an email request for personal information and then gets taken for everything they're worth. You shake your head in disgust at the scam artists but then take comfort in the fact that that will never be you. You're much too smart to fall for any of that.

So you continue on with your online shopping life, not terribly worried about evil befalling you, until you get denied for a $76 dollar purchase in the grocery store.
Embarassed and confused you finally figure out that it didn't matter that you were too smart to fall for the "Gimme your personal info scam" the scammers were smarter than you and hacked in to your Paypal account and bought some software and hardware for several hundred dollars WITH YOUR MONEY.

Fortunately, you report it in time and although you're incensed that this happened to you you get all your money back.

You change your passwords and immediately install updated anti-virus software but you're raw from this and don't shop online for awhile.

After a few months you decide to dip your toe in the pool. As it turns out the water is fine, so you dive in, resuming your online shopping as if there had never been an issue.

The years pass without incident until today when you try to log on to you eBay account. Upon typing in the password you know is correct you're denied access. You try twice more thinking perhaps you typed it wrong, to no avail. You then request eBay send you your user name and password. Nothing comes.

This is all so odd you decide to contact eBay.

Only to find someone has hacked in to your account. They're putting up auctions and charging fees to you like there was no tomorrow. You're not sure but they may have hacked in to your email account to re-route emails from eBay to themselves.

You are in a semi-panic because you've had this particular email address for a while and you don't want to shut it down.

eBay takes the fraudulent auctions down. You change all your passwords again and question whether or not you should close this particular email address but decide you're not quite ready. You change your eBay communications to another email address and hope that solves it.

But still you feel all weird and violated.

This was minor you keep telling yourself. It could have been much worse.

And it helps. Sort of.

But you want those hackers to know. "I've got my eye on you, bitches!"

And then... for the first time in your life start to think torture isn't such a bad thing.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

That. Totally. Sucks.
That would piss me off to no end. Having to change all my passwords and such? Holy. Sh!t.

Carolyn said...

Ack. BOTH of those things happened to me. I'm still paranoid and it was more than 2 years ago. Sorry you had to go through it too.

Virtualsprite said...

Wow. That is... awful. I've never had that happen to me, but now I'm going to be on the lookout.

Hope you can get everything straightened out. Ugh.

Whiskeymarie said...

People that do this sort of theivery need to be beaten- repeatedly. I shop a TON online, so I suppose it's only a matter of time before it happens to me (knocks on wood).

Debbie said...

I am so sorry you have had to go through this. I had several thousand dollars of fraudulent credit card charges last year. It made me so angry.

Not Afraid To Use It said...

Holy shit!!! That is AWFUL!! I'm glad you think it is minor because I think my eyes would have popped out of my head as a precursor to my head exploding. I am so, so sorry. I hope they catch the bastards.

John D. said...

Now see what you did? I decided to come over here and bug YOU. : )