Crappy News of the Year

Well, I woke up this morning, grabbed a drink and sat down at my desk like I do most mornings. I usually spend 20 minutes or so waking up and checking my e-mail and what not. All the sudden I notice these e-mails... "Thanks for your purchase at Bandcamp." Thanks for your purchase and "this" store and "that" store.

Then I notice the big ones...The confirmation e-mails from Pay-pal. Four of them to be exact. Why is this such a big deal? Why am I feeling like I'm about to kill someone and maybe have a heart attack in the process? Well, I never made these purchases.

Aparently someone in the UK has hacked my Pay-Pal account and decided to treat themselves to music and other downloadable things...things that can't, of course, be sent to an actual address. Seems they spent almost $200 of my money on their music and fun.

After long talks with Pay-Pal and their center for fraud and theft, however, I am almost starting to feel sorry for this moron. As I stated, they already had it traced to the UK...and a few other leads as well. Allthough there was nothing mailed to a private address. And after talking with the Pay-pal team, I've learned a little more on their international laws and ouch is all I have to say. Pretty stupid to do something that's going to have you spending quite a bit of time in a federal prison for only a couple hundred bucks. But, it is after all a federal offense, pretty much like robbing a bank itself. So, you see, it doesn't matter how much was taken, you'll still see a lot of time from it.

And I must say...the person has some terrible taste in music.

Now the only thing I can't understand is how they hacked it to begin with. Keylogger maybe? I've checked my system and found nothing. Doesn't mean that something isn't there tho. Noone has my info for stuff. And I am very careful about what sites I go to.

When they catch this dumb ass, I plan on plastering all the info everywhere for everyone to see. It is afterall public records and anyone can view this info. It's not slander...it's not harasement. It's my God given right to show the entire world who this FOOL is.

And he's lucky he's some twit on-line and even another country. Because if it were someone close by, he would dissapear.

ouch dude

I had someone clone a credit card of mine once, so i kinda know what your going through, really sucks

I hope they catch the S.O.B........

Made me think of this. This is long but quite funny, even if you can't follow all the geek speak.

That really sucks, I'm glad you seem to have worked it out with paypal though, and I hope they catch the person who did it.

I'm sorry such a thing happened to you!!!
The only "easy" thing you could do to prevent something like this in the future ( or make it less likely to happen) would be to
1. change your passwords on all your email and other accounts regularly ( I try to change mine every 2 months) and
2. use different passwords on your accounts.


With a firewall in place and an antivirus, that's all you can do really.. watch for the ssl and whatnot other verification things on your bank and paypal website... don't use internet explorer lol j/k

But even if you do all of this already, there's still a chance some jackass gets through. I bet we will see a lot of hacked SW:TOR accounts after the game launches, too.

Having had my machine hacked and my debit card used by some outsider, you have my complete sympathy. Near as I can tell the keylogger that caused me all my grief was hidden in my BIOS (I kid you not). I finally got rid of my problem by reformatting everything... a royal pain... and my bank catching the unauthorized access to my account. As an aside, would you believe that there is an off shore company that does nothing more than route phone messages all over the world to ensure that you maximize the cost of your conversation? That what the folks who hacked me used, so a simple $0.10/minute call was costing $2.75/minute... Really bizarre.

As to the video from DefCon 18, I loved it. I haven't laughed that hard in awhile and yes, I'm a techie nerd.

Good that you (kinda) solved it, sad to hear it happened :/

Dang Cold! Lets get with Ty in the UK, and send out a Crazies "hit squad(tm)" out on this knucklehead!!!

Schwendo wrote:

Dang Cold! Lets get with Ty in the UK, and send out a Crazies "hit squad(tm)" out on this knucklehead!!!

I'm up for it.