One Hack of a Week

First some scam artist tried to bully me into a website marketing ploy.

The very next day, my daughter's credit card got hacked.

The next day, MY credit card got hacked. My bank caught it right away and cancelled the card. I spent the next week having to update information on all my auto pay accounts, only to have to turn around and repeat the process ten days later when the new credit card was received.

An attorney had suggested I freeze my credit when I told him about the phony attorney accusing me of plagiarizing content, just to be safe. He also suggested I contact my hosting company to make sure security is in place, just in case someone tries to hack my website, and he suggested I change the passwords to all my websites.

When I contacted my web host, I was shocked to discover the company had been sold, and reviews of the new conglomerate were not too favorable. I learned the annual fee their "partner" charges to "protect" client websites is prohibitively high, and I learned one of the methods the "security" partner regularly pulls on those who sign up for the "protection" is a false hacking scare in which they try to suck even more money out of the client, when the "problem" is easily fixed by the deletion of a file on said website.

I looked up reviews on web hosts, hoping to find a less shady company, but the nightmares experienced in moving a website sounded too intimidating for me right now. I'd gone through that process several years ago when I moved from a free blogging platform to my own website, and the process then wasn't much better than it apparently is now. I don't have the time to devote to it right now, so I'll have to stay put for a while. Needless to say, I felt as if I'd been scammed all over again.

I changed as many accounts as I could remember from my 1994 email address to my current email address back when I set up the current email address. (I can't remember now how long ago that was.) I had to change email addresses because my nearly lifelong provider had decided it didn't want to be in the business of email anymore and was therefore charging $25 per month for the service. Choke, choke!!!

No, thank you!!!

Every once in a while, I'd get a snail mail notification of another account I'd forgotten. At the end of "hack" week, I received yet another notification from a subscription I've been paying for monthly for at least four years but perhaps as long as six years. The company notified me via my backup email address that my card was declined... the very same card that had been hacked. I'd forgotten to update the email and the card on that one.

Customer service was a hoot. I had to contact them because there was no method on the website to update an email address OR credit card. It didn't take long for me to understand that's because the company wants to phase out all the grandfathered accounts from the really decent-priced package that is no longer available. In other words, they wanted more money.

Oh, well, it's a service I need, and I do use it every month, so I'll sign up for the bump up. But in changing my old email address, the CS rep mistyped .com as .con. Then couldn't understand why I wasn't receiving the confirmation emails. In the end, I had two accounts with the company, one with my paid .com address that wouldn't allow me to log in because my credentials matched the second, unusuable address, and one with a 7-day free trial .con address, which was the one showing my payment had been made and yet said I still needed to purchase a subscription. Yet another nightmare to solve!!!

Everything's up to date now, as far as I know. Until the next notification that I've forgotten to update something!!!

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