On Wednesday, December 14th, my Facebook profile was hijacked and taken over by a bad guy. They pulled this off by logging into my email server and intercepting password reset requests while I slept. Once they got in,they changed the name and pic of the account, then friended someone I don’t know (to scrape my data), and then posted something that ensured the FB algorithms would shut the account down and disable it. Disabling is bad, unlike a suspension, this is permanent with no review. Sigh. Merry Christmas to me!
After extensive research/tests, I think how they got through my mail server was by scraping my phone at a public wifi spot. The last couple weeks I’ve been teaching at a lot of locations around town, and I do know one time I logged into the public wifi. Even if I didn’t send an email out, my email app was still pinging the server. It’s ridiculously easy for someone to sit there and packet sniff all traffic and then un-encrypt it to get all this info while they drink their coffee.
Under normal circumstances I would just create a new account or walk away entirely. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with FB over the years so I could do that, but it is one of my primary ways to get news out about my classes and what I do, so I’m doing everything I can to get back on there, despite FB’s multitude of walled gardens to protect them from any interaction with one of their customers.
I have no idea how long this will take, but I’m going to give it the good fight. It’s not a coincidence that a day or two after releasing my ART KITS that this happened. Every time I make advances in the life God wants me to have with teaching children’s drawing classes, Satan waltzes right in and disrupts what I’m doing in one annoying way after the other. This is only a setback, and God will be victorious in the end, so stay tuned here for any further updates to my class stuff!