This past month held a personal technology crisis for me. I was locked out of my Google Account.
I don’t know how it happened, I’m not one to usually fall for phishing schemes. I know, for example, that when I get an email saying it’s from eBay and I need to update information, to not click on the link in the email, but open my browser and physically type in “eBay.com” and sign in there to update any info so that the creep that sent me the email can’t redirect me and steal my password. So, yeah, I have no idea how it happened, but it did.
I was locked out of everything that I use to organize my life. All of my email (I route all of my personal and work email through my GMail account), my calendar and schedules, many of my notes as well as the personal, ministry and technology blogs and sites that I read on a daily basis. I Googled (still the best, even so) for the error message that I was getting and found out that there have been instances where Google locked people out of their address due to suspected spamming. This is when I remembered that I had sent our prayer letter to our supporters via email (a list 190 strong), so I sent an email to my account from my work address which I had re-secured just to see if the account was suspended.
Subj: hi
how is it going?
From there I ran across a blog of a woman who had the same thing occur to her a few months ago, but had gotten back into her account after two weeks. I commented and waited to see what would happen.
While I waited I noticed that I had received an email from my stolen account in response to the one that I had sent:
Subj: Re: hi
Oh it is cool here how may i know you jason?
Ahh! Now the guy (or gal) is messing with me! Now they’ve hacked into my account and they’re taunting me! This is when I freaked out.
I finally started to go around and try to re-secure my eBay, Amazon and other accounts that I had purchased things on that might have my credit card info stored. I found then that eBay was hacked as well… after chatting with Ivana, the eBay support person on their site I was able to get back in and gain control again – the jerk hadn’t bought anything, but had inquired about water storage tanks and changed the address on the account to a fake one in Connecticut (I found out it was fake when I called the town’s police and was informed that it was a real road with nothing at that address’ location) as well as a fake phone number (not real at all).
It was later that day that I received an email from the woman whose blog I had posted on, she gave me an email address of a Google employee who had helped her, I’ll just call him Aaron. I thanked her and emailed Aaron… he responded in less than 5 minutes! He escalated the issue to the next level of customer service (since I had gotten no help with the Google account recovery service on the day I was locked out, only receiving a message that “the investigation into the issue was inconclusive”).
All I could do was wait, since Google has a 5 day waiting period before you can try to answer the security question (during those 5 days no one can even attempt to log into the system)… so I waited and didn’t get into my Google.
After about a week and a half I tried again… the security question was available!
I answered it and I was back in! The long story short(er) is that the hacker didn’t send any email with my account, nor did they read any sensitive info (that I know about). I’ve changed all of my passwords to different passwords for each site using a method that I can remember the password without any problem.
Followup: I emailed Aaron today and he asked me to not give out his email address to others with this problem, this is what he had to say:
As much as I’d really love to help lots and lots of people (especially with something as critical as e-mail), I really do worry that I could quickly become overwhelmed with requests; all it’d take is for one grateful person to blog “I wrote Aaron Xxxxxx at Xxxxxx@google.com, and he fixed my problem” and as you can imagine, well, I’d have to change my e-mail address
I know that the gmail team is working to further improve the ways in which they restore account access, so I’d really prefer that people go through that channel.
Take care, and happy early Fourth of July!
He helped me out a ton, so out of respect and appreciation I am not going to give out his email address if someone asks. I would love to help other people in my predicament, but there are ways to get it taken care of. Just wait your two weeks and try the question, hopefully the hacker will leave it alone and you’ll get back in.
In the mean time, take some time and search Lifehacker.com for some ideas of how to back up your GMail to other accounts or systems, I’ve taken a number of precautions now and I should be able to at least get to my information even if someone has hacked into my account.
