by OldGuy » 31 Jan 2018, 02:04
I have had two run-ins with hackers.
The first was when I opened a gmail email account. Although I had what I thought was a fairly secure password, a hacker stole that email address by changing the password within days. I was unable to get gmail to cooperate in correcting the issue and have never been able to use that email address. That was about 5 years ago. I still get a constant flow of spam email messages from that account to my other main email address, which I had used as an emergency contact email for retrieving the gmail account.
At least I had never put any kind of email list on that account before it was hijacked. No one else that I know has ever told me about receiving junk messages "from me" via that account.
The other hack job was more recent. I share an apartment with another old retired guy because neither of us can afford a place on our own. We both live on very low social security retirement income. My roommate does not have a computer and has never been on the internet. We are far from wealthy or what you might consider a target for hackers.
Someone, somehow got their hands on one of his checks. He only pays a few bills via checks and we can't figure out how anyone other than a clerk at the local utility company might have even seen one of his checks. At any rate, with just the printed information on one of his checks, someone managed to open a fake Paypal account in his name in early December 2017. He has no online experience at all and never heard of Paypal.
By using that fake Paypal account, they made a series of small withdrawals through the month of December until they had completely emptied his checking account, leaving a wake of overdraft fees and a negative balance. They somehow were able to use that link to attack his savings account and emptied that as well.
He happened to check his balance around Christmas and discovered the hack activity about that time. He had a huge negative overdraft balance instead of anything close to what he expected.
I contacted Paypal fraud team by phone and discovered the hacker had opened a Paypal account in his name with all the details that could only have come from the printed details on his check. They used a fake SS number as ID. Paypal flagged and closed that account, but that was only one step.
We have now spent most of January trying to recover the losses. We had to file a separate report for each unauthorized withdrawal with the bank. It was a pile of pages. We had to go to the local police to get a police file number and had multiple pages of security questions with the bank for their security team to investigate the thefts.
All his autodraft authorized payments bounced in January and the ripples are still going on. He was not able to pay his rent or any other bills because his SS retirement check was automatically deposited in the bank and he had no access to his own money during the month long investigation.
The bank had to close both his checking and savings accounts and he finally received new account numbers just a couple of days ago. He is still waiting for a new ATM card and has to order new checks, re-establish the autodraft payments for regular bills, change the deposit information for where his SS check gets deposited and still has to wait for his new checks to pay the February 1st rent that is now coming due.
This entire process has now taken more than a month and we are still not done. Fortunately, we have been here long enough that the landlord is patiently waiting for all the corrections for January and now February rent. If not for that, my roommate would be out on the street by now for no fault of his own.
You don't have to be rich to be a target of these crooks. Anyone can be hit and correcting the problems takes a long time.
