Hacker | Aimless Amy

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One day I logged into my Facebook account to find it has been disabled. Someone had reported my identity as fake and as a result Facebook requested a copy of my ID to prove I was, me.

I sent them my driver’s license. Easy enough, right? Of course not. It’s Facebook we are talking here.

So about 24 hours later they write me back and ask me for more proof.

This time I sent them the first page of my latest bank statement, which included my name and address, a copy of my social security card and a copy of my health insurance card which included my date of birth, which had to match the name and date of birth on my account.

About 24 hours later they write me back, with the exact letter they sent me 24 hours prior, as if I hadn’t just sent them 3 more forms of ID. Forms of ID mind you that they asked for (they provide you a list of what kinds of additional ID they want from you).

So this time I sent them a copy of my vehicle insurance card from Progressive.

The next day I tried to Google out a number for Facebook. I found some web page that gave me a 1-800 number for Facebook tech support. Within a few seconds I was on the phone with someone who said they were Facebook tech support and I told them my problem.

They wanted to connect to my account and asked me to go to FastSupport.com. I did and they connected to my computer remotely.

He opened up Facebook and as it had said before, it said …

Thanks for providing your ID

Thanks for your patience as we work to verify this account. We’ll email you as soon as we’ve reviewed your ID.

The next thing he did was go to the command prompt and enter my email address. The thing of it is, you can’t access your gmail account from the dos command prompt. So next he ran the tree command, listing off every directly in my computer. It does nothing more than just display every directory on your drive.

He starts to talk about how someone from Las Vegas has access to my email and has hijacked my account.

Somehow magically when the tree command finished displaying all the directories on my computer he came up with a message telling me that very thing.

Funny thing is, I know just enough about computers to know that isn’t possible to get that sort of message. He would have had to type it in copy and paste it at the cmd line for it to display that message.

Long story short, to fix my poor hijacked computer, I would need to pay him $300. I asked him what this had to do with my Facebook account and he said we can’t fix that problem over the phone, even though previously he had said that’s why he wanted to connect to my computer, so that I didn’t need to upload my ids, he could verify it remotely.

No he can’t do that. But he can fix my “hacked computer” for only $300.