My "Hacker" makes his demands of me known to a concerned friend. He demands in an earlier e-mail that I contact him by a deadline otherwise I won't be able to live in peace.
It all started with a strange e-mail with the subject line "Don't think you can ignore me."
As a social media junkie, spam in not unfamiliar territory for me. Written in Spanish, I was demanded to contact the sender because they had "dirty" photos of me that they would begin sending to all my contacts in my e-mail list and posting on Facebook.
I deleted it. Spam from some crazy person.
However, since 9am this morning I've spent the day on the phone with panicked friends calling about nude photos that were showing up as my profile display picture on Facebook. Impossible. I hadn't even been on Facebook since before American Thanksgiving, if not longer. And I certainly was not a silly teenage girl with compromising photos that were intended for my boyfriends eyes only!
Reality hit home when my password for Facebook came up as incorrect, and when trying to reset it to the associated e-mail account's password also showed up as failing to work.
My heart started sinking when I recalled that I had been previously tracking my weight loss results from a commitment to drop 40 pounds by 2011. For those of you who do know me, you recall my obsession with missing work out time, concerns about stretch marks and cellulite, and the utter dispair at confronting the possibilty that I may never see my abs again.
I took the photos with my smart phone, and e-mailed them to my account to move over to a portable hard drive. I failed to delete the e-mails.
I watched mortified via my sisters account, as my photos appeared on my Facebook profile for all 1000+ business colleagues, school friends, strangers and family along with headless women that were ones I wished I could be naked appeared as my main image.
That is when the flurry of e-mails to helpful friends reporting these ridiculous photos came from this cyber stalker. "Tell Stefany she needs to contact me or else I will continue to post photos and e-mail them to all her contacts", comes the messages from my account. I call the police, because now I have no idea what to do. My social media savviness, has also linked all my e-mails and social media accounts together. This is going to be my worst nightmare coming true.
The Toronto Police put me through to their cyber crimes division, and we begin the process of filing a complaint. I have gone through the process of trying to notify Facebook that my account has been compromised. The process is slow, difficult to navigate, and quite frankly so maze like that as an already disoriented individual based on the circumstances, I needed to have someone more together than myself do it for me. My msn account that was compromised I had opened in 2001. I was maybe 19 at the time - it was my first professional account that I would begin sending resumes and school assignments from.
Back then I didn't have a security question. Nor did I have to link it to another e-mail address. Nor did SMS notifications exist. I remember that I was told that you shouldn't give your real address on the internet, so I made up a fake one to get the hotmail account completed. Now, 10 years later they want this information in order to cancel my account. They also want to know the name of the folders or subject lines of e-mails.
I stopped using this account when I got a real job, a professional internet service provider e-mail and moved to living on a smartphone. I began using it to sign up for social media accounts though - so that all the spam from their notifications could go there and I would never have to see it.
As I wait in angst for someone to help me shut down these compromised accounts, I am slowly locked out of Twitter. Twitter nicely lets me know that if the e-mail account is shut down, the e-mail address will be available to use in 30 days. I begin changing passwords for things I can remember I have as fast as I can think about them.
Under the Canadian Criminal Code, this is considered harrassing communication and possible extortion if demands for money begin. The police will be coming by next week. Of course, as with all big social media sites - there is not one damn e-mail, phone number or person you can contact to help you. You get to sit and watch your life be destroyed at the hands of someone who doesn't know anything about you.
Cyber laws are so vague and cross national borders that depending on where this is all happening no one is accountable. Not the culprit, not the internet service provider, not the e-mail provider, not the social networking site.
This is the side of social media that I have failed to address in my blogging. I thought that things like this only happened to Paris Hilton from money hungry and fame starved ex's. Hopefully, we can begin a dialouge on how to make people accountable for cyber crimes that make falling asleep at night the hardest thing to do for the victims.