Hey Everyone!
On August 4th, I was minding my own business reading emails when I came across an email from a “clothing company” that wanted to do a collab with me. Nothing at all strange about that, right? Before clicking on any links in the email, I did what I always do which is Google the company to see if it’s real. It’s a legitimate clothing company called Nectar Clothing. Feel free to click on the link to see for yourself (I promise, the link is safe). They have some really cute clothes too! You can imagine how excited I got when I looked at the site…gifted product here I come!
Going back to the email, there was a link to their Instagram account embedded so I could see examples of the type of look they wanted for the collab. That is not uncommon, brands do it ALL the time. So I clicked on the link to their “Instagram Account” and much to my surprise, I was taken to the Instagram account of another clothing company. I thought it was weird but just figured that maybe they embedded the wrong link. Within 5 minutes, I received an email from Instagram stating that my username had been changed. It was the standard email they send when your password or username has been changed. I clicked the link in the email and was taken to Instagram where I attempted to log in. Nothing. I was not able to log in. I went back to my email and saw that I had a new email titled “Hack Instagram Account”. The body of the email read as follows:
“We apologize for the inconvenience! Waiting for the answer for 2 hours, if not, clear your account (delete photos) and sell your account.”
I panicked. I immediately began scrambling to save my account but noticed that the username was changed to this:
They even changed the phone number and email address that was associated with the account. The only thing left for me to do was to try reaching out to Instagram through the app. The account was no longer showing up though so I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that. I attempted to contact them via another account that I had but that didn’t work either. For any of you who have never had your account hacked, Instagram makes it almost impossible to get in touch with them. It’s like they don’t want to be bothered with fixing anything After the first hour had gone by, I received another email from them that read as follows:
“Waiting for the answer for 1 hour, if not, clear your account (delete photos) and sell your account!”
Now let me be honest in saying that after I got that email, I responded with some very harsh words. I’m sure I called them and pretty much everyone they know a horrible name that I dare not write in this post. LOL! The response I received back was to let me know that if I paid them $250 USD they would return my account back to me with no issues. For those of you who are unaware, this is called “Ransom”. I never knew that word was being used to describe social media hacks until this happened. My response back to them was that they were crazy and that I would never pay them a dime….that was until I started to think about all of the hard work that has gone into that account over the years. My husband, being the amazing man that he is, immediately offered to pay the money so I could get my account back. However, after going through the process of paying them, they stopped responding to my emails altogether.
How was I supposed to get my account back now?
In order to keep this post from becoming a book, I’m going to continue telling this story in another post. Make sure you stay tuned to read about how I was able to get my account back!
Until next time…
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