Kindergarten Field Trips and Muggings in Scotland

Last week,  I had the opportunity to chaperone The Girl's kindergarten field trip to Toby's Theatre in Columbia to see Winnie the Pooh's Friendship. Around the time the bus got to the theatre, I started getting texts and emails from friends and relatives telling me that they had just received an email from me explaining that we had taken a short trip to Scotland, and had been mugged at gunpoint, and all of our identification and money had been stolen. Wouldn't they please respond, so that I could tell them how to send money to me so that I could get home.

I don't believe that any of the 30 or 40 people who contacted me that day believed for a second that I had been mugged in Scotland. They quickly recognized this for what it was.  I had been hacked. But, the large number of people who responded tells you that people understand how serious this problem can be.

So, I sat through Winnie the Pooh with a couple hundred young children all laughing hysterically at Pooh, Piglet and Tigger's antics, all the while thinking through all of the things I was going to have to do after I got home. Check all of my bank accounts for activity. Check any shopping accounts that had a saved credit card. Immediately change all passwords. See if anyone was trying to post a Patch blog in my name. Figure out how in the world this happened in the first place.

What I later came to realize is that somehow my Facebook account was hacked first, and I had the bad judgment to use the same password on my Facebook and email account. My best advice to you is DO NOT use the same password for your Facebook and email. The hacker, besides sending emails to my entire email list, wiped out my contacts, my sent mail list, and Facebook chatted with several of my friends assuring them it was really me and I really needed help.  

I was quickly able to reclaim my email account, as the hacker had not changed the password, so I changed it right away. It took me several more hours and my brother letting me know there was a problem to realize the hacker had changed the forwarding and replies settings on my account so that any emails I sent out, when replied to, would go to the hacker's account, not mine. So I finally fixed that, too. 

It was a little more difficult to reclaim my Facebook, but not impossible. I was able to tell Facebook, through their online forms, that I had both "forgotten" my new password and no longer had access to the email address that the account was under (which was now the hacker's email address). They allowed me to go through a verification process using several of my friends on the account, who contacted me with codes that Facebook sent to them, that I had to input in a web form, to verify that I was who I said I was, and then wait 24 hours to regain access to my account. Cumbersome, but at least I got my account back. 

So, my advice, don't use the same passwords for different accounts. I've now changed all of my passwords - bank, insurance, websites, you name it, and I don't think two of them are the same. If you are a techie, there is software out there that you can use to store all those passwords so you just have to remember one password to get into the software (and some of them are retrievable on computer and smartphone).  

I'm sure glad I was watching Winnie the Pooh, and not getting mugged in Scotland last week, but I have to say, I could have done without this bit of drama in my life.