Hacked! Staff Responded in Less then 48 hours!!!!

[gabriellaeve]

EDIT A very nice staffer has now returned my account to me - The even better news is to the best of my knowledge everything is intact Thank You soooo much for everyone who helped or just wished me luck - it has been just over 25 hours since my account was taken, I just want people to know it is possible to get things back quickly if you are polite and persistant.

I'm soooooooooo happy!




Well, I'm ready to call it official I've been hacked - because I've always kept a pretty low profile I never thought it would happen to me.

I've submitted the hacked form on Neo - is there anything else I can do? I've been participating really activily in this plot and I don't want to miss the rest of it

Does anyone have emails of helpful staff people that I could try (if you don't want to post them PM me)

I'm honestly just in shock - I don't understand why someone would have done this to me...

Last edited by gabriellaeve on Tue Oct 18, 2005 11:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.

[arogance1]

Change your password and email address immediately.

If they know your password, they can get back.

If they've changed your email, they can either change your password meaning you lose your account altogether, or they can request your password as forgotten and retrieve it whenever they want.

Most importantly, Don't panic

[Troggy7]

If anything, you were scammed. D:

[gabriellaeve]

They have already changed my password, I cannot get in to the account at all, that is how I found out something was wrong.

Intelectually I understand that I must have been "scammed" and thats the form I used, I don't understand how this could have happened though. This is the only neo related website I go to. I am an adult (not to say adults don't make mistakes) but you can be darn sure that I havn't given anyone my password or filled out any forms.

As I've said I keep a very low profile, occasionally I post on the Plushie Tycoon board on Neo and I play some world challenges but other than that I'm very much a "private citizen" As you can see from my post count I don't even post here that much (mostly I read - don't have much to say!)

Thats why I'm so baffled as to how A) Someone even decided to target me and B)How they got my password

If I get my account back I've definatley learned some valuable lessons (that I admitedly should have learned earlier) such as no hotmail accounts - ever!

Whats keeping me balanced right now is the fact that my account seems to be intact. All 4 pets are there, my gallery is intact, my petpets are still attached. My husband likens this to a "smash and grab" he thinks they probably emptied my bank account and ran - which would stink but at least I can earn my points back, it would be heartbreaking to lose my pets and have to start from scratch with them as well.

Anyway, I'd really like to be doing something more proactive about this- does anyone know can you send an email to staff aobut this? Or do I just have to wait my turn in the queue for the scam form to go thru?

[arogance1]

I'm assuming you've put your username in the "Forgotten your password" section at the bottom to have the password emailled to you.
Unless they've changed the email address too

[gabriellaeve]

Yup - They're brilliant, they appear to have gotten into my hotmail account, changed that password - then used the request password function to get and change my neo password.

Quite the efficent little creeps.

Basically all I can do now is hope that I can give TNT enough info to prove that I am the origional owner of the account - I just hope it doesn't take 6 months like I've seen in some post on here.

[Gemhustler]

Since they took over your Hotmail account as well, have you tried to change the password for that account? You should be able to do it just by answering your private question.

I have a couple of staff email addy's I'll send your way threw PM. Good Luck and I hope you get your account back very soon.

Sorry this has happened to you

[everconfused]

Yup - They're brilliant, they appear to have gotten into my hotmail account, changed that password - then used the request password function to get and change my neo password.

Quite the efficent little creeps.

Basically all I can do now is hope that I can give TNT enough info to prove that I am the origional owner of the account - I just hope it doesn't take 6 months like I've seen in some post on here.

As Gemhustler advised, try changing your hotmail password. Hopefully they didn't change anything else in your email account. That someone got into that and changed it is much bigger than your Neopets account. They have access to anything you use that hotmail account for - I watched my roomie go through all kinds of pain when her's got hacked and the person who did it went shopping. No, she doesn't have a Neo account, but she does have ebay and amazon along with a few other sites.

If you can't change your hotmail password, contact the hotmail people ASAP that this happened. Apparently (don't know how myself) hotmail is fairly easy to break into. The only question is - did they break into your neo account first and get your email addy there or did they get into your hotmail first and from there by looking at sent/received emails go after your neo account.

I don't consider you were "scammed" - maybe not an actual "hack", but at the least you were "cracked". I hope this gets taken care of quickly for you. Please keep us posted.

[gabriellaeve]

thats one saving grace, I didn't really use that hotmail account for much of anything - actually thats part of the problem, I had pretty much abandoned that account several years ago (when hotmail stopped letting you download there email into a mail client) so I have no idea how long this person has had access to that email.

I've submitted the form and sent emails to the staff members that some PPTers have been kind enough to PM me, hopefully I'll get some response - I just need to get someone to listen to me enough to let me send them the documentation I have (I was thinking that my temple map would be pretty good evidence since they're all unique) It would be nice if this got resolved in time for me to finish the plot, but I'm not holding my breath...*sigh* I keep checking to see that my pets are still there - so far, so good :-(


!!!! UPDATE!!!

My Account has disappeared from the search function - this is probably good right? It means someone is looking at it??

!!UPDATE AGAIN!!
Ok, now it says my account has been "Frozen because this user was using mulitple accounts to earn neopoints" So that at least explains what the hacker was doing with my account I guess - I hope this doesn't complicate getting it back - ugh, I"m ill I just got a response to my first form from yesterday, seemed like pretty much a form response, I emailed her back, hopefully I'll get someone to take an interest.

[labbiedor]

I'm so sorry that happened to you! I absolutely despise people who do that. Everyone else has pretty much covered everything, but I hope TNT will unfreeze your account for you soon. Good luck!

[Anoohilator]

Best of luck getting your account back

[stampsyne]

Freezing of a stolen account is a GOOD thing. It keeps more damage from being done while TNT corrects the problem!

[Anoohilator]

Freezing of a stolen account is a GOOD thing. It keeps more damage from being done while TNT corrects the problem!

But it would have been better if there was no problem in the first place

[gabriellaeve]

I was certainly hoping that they would freeze me - I was just a little concerned that my account was frozen for doing something bad - I don't want them to come back and say that I can't have the account because of that.


I'm sure its a good thing - I really appreciate everyone who has tried to help - or who has said something to cheer me up to all of you, this board is really making this whole thing a lot easier (at least I'm not stewing by myself )

[stampsyne]

NOW change your e-mail and ALL passowords into really hard to guess ones that are DIFFERENT from each other and contain at least one number or character.

You may have been a victim of a 'guesser' which is an individual or group who makes a list of all accounts that they come in contact with and then try to access every account using a list of most common passwords. Most try only once a day per account.