Sometimes during Covid, it’s been hard to scoop up a decent entry for my daily gratitude journal. Now, thanks to an enterprising computer nerd somewhere, it’s no trouble at all. Any day I don’t get hacked is a good one. I didn’t get hacked! will be my new default entry.
It all started with a text that someone had charged $1.06 to my Discover card for an Amazon purchase. Wasn’t me. I checked. It wasn’t even for some supposedly “free trial” I hadn’t remembered to unsubscribe from.
I’d barely reached out to Discover before Facebook started asking me to change my password because someone from Texas had attempted to get in. “Thank you, Facebook, “I said, grateful that Texas had not galloped into my account and fired off hateful messages for all my friends to see.
The relief was short-lived when I tried to log in the next day and discovered that Texas had apparently enlisted an entire posse of hackers, and with each attempt I was invited to jump through a more daunting series of hoops to get “unlocked.” Still, I was grateful the hackers were inept. Invited to review every recent post, I could sign off that they were indeed mine.
Speaking of gratitude, I even talked myself into the idea that the elaborate sign-in process was what my mother would have called “a blessing in disguise.” It was such a hassle to check Facebook that I was doing it less often. Hallelujah!
It was a little harder to feel grateful for some hacker from California, who I learned via text from Amazon had also “attempted” to hack my account there. That was the last text I’d receive since the hacker went on to delete my phone number, change my email address to his, change my password and enact two-step verification, something I obviously should have done before he arrived on the scene.
Lucky for me – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – I could still see all this in real time because it took days after I contacted customer service for someone to cut off his access to my account. Still logged in, I could see all the messages going out to the hacker’s email confirming what the hacker was doing with my account and that Amazon was investigating the hacker.
He seemed to be busier than Amazon was. Although I’d disabled the credit cards on file, he moved on to my gift card balance – first charging it $1.06 for a Kindle version of The Complete Instant Pot Cookbook. Worse yet, he proceeded to write an online review of the book–under my name and with an unflattering old picture of me.
Thankfully, Amazon has taken it down because he was better at hacking than reviewing. I did not feel grateful to see my name and bad picture plastered on an Instant Pot review that concluded with “Now I know all the things I can make with my air fryer.”
Oddly the bad review bothered me more than the next discovery: that he’d also shipped himself or a friend in Newcastle, Delaware, a mini-iPad courtesy of my gift card balance. But I was grateful that the iPad inspired more speed from Amazon. Before the last $8 evaporated, Customer Service representative Number 5, someone named Noah, changed the email address back to my own and cut off the hacker’s access to my account. Thank you, Noah.
All of this occurred just before someone attempted to hack an old Instagram account, to which I have lost the password, and also before my router and modem crashed – possibly from overuse – and two electrical plugs went dead in my office.
Happily, these are all things that don’t happen during an ordinary week – which I hope I will remember, the next time I search for gratitude entries. Plus all those all the “blessing in disguise” things I learned – about constantly changing passwords and using two-step verification. And I will definitely be grateful if Jeff Bezos, reading my laboriously crafted e-mail, changes Amazon’s fraud investigation practices.
I suppose I could also be grateful that the whole thing was a wonderful distraction from debates on vaccines and Afghanistan and whatever Congress is disagreeing on this week.
But somehow taking a hike through the fall leaves seems like a better option. I’m grateful I just thought of that.
Copyright 2021 Pat Snyder
