To hell with the hackers

This week, my Instagram account was hacked. 

I was about to say, it’s embarrassing to admit that I fell victim to a scam, but actually, why the hell should I feel embarrassed?!

I’d received a message from a friend of mine on Instagram (who I didn't know had been hacked) asking me if I’d vote for him in an art competition. This friend is an artist and the message was personally worded to sound like him so I readily agreed.

I’ve voted a few times for musician friends in online competitions so I didn’t think to question it and happily clicked on the link he sent me. A couple of seconds later I was logged out of my account and Instagram kindly notified me that someone had just signed into it from Nigeria.

There then followed a really stressful few hours where I tried in vain to get back into my account but the hackers had changed the security and authentication settings, so every time I verified that I was the account holder with Instagram they sent the hackers the authentication codes!

I did a little bit of investigating online and discovered that this is a popular scam currently doing the rounds. The hackers send personal messages from a friend about some kind of competition that they’ve tailored to sound believable i.e. my artist friend entering an art competition. Then, once they’ve hacked your account they start spamming people with crypto currency scams via your posts and stories.

Thankfully, my friends and family know that I’d never, ever go near crypto, let alone spam people about it, so within minutes I was receiving concerned messages to let me know what was happening.

When I got nowhere with Instagram trying to regain access to my account I decided that I had no choice but to burn it to the ground and asked my friends to start reporting my account for being hacked.

Thankfully, that seemed to do the trick as apparently the scamming and spamming stopped, but then the hackers started texting and WhatsApping me, pretending to be Instagram in a series of laughably amateurish messages.

When the first message came through I felt a horrible mixture of anger and intrusion but then I had a lightbulb moment as a thought occurred to me…

This only matters if I give a crap!

And just like that, I decided that I was no longer going to give a crap and I started to laugh instead.

I blocked and reported every text message they sent until they finally stopped and I kept asking friends to report my account for being hacked.

According to the article I read the hackers often go on to demand that you pay them a sum of money to return your account to you. I thought of them hoping I’d be desperate enough to pay them and I laughed even harder.

To me, the best thing about my old Instagram account was the lovely connections I’d formed there - with friends and family, people I’d met while travelling, and readers of my books. 

Out of the 975 people who were following me, I’d guess that only about 75 actually interacted with me. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the hundreds of others who’d chosen to follow my account, but who knew if they were even seeing my content anymore due to the Instagram algorithm. 

I could create a new, minimalist account, follow the people I had those great connections with and start afresh. So that’s exactly what I did.

And then last night I listened to a podcast where I heard this 17th century haiku from the Japanese poet, Mizuta Masahide:

Barn’s burned down

Now I can see

The moon.

I thought it was beautiful, and perfectly captured the moment for me. When I imagined having a smaller, more intimate Instagram account I could instantly see a silvery, moonshiney lining.

I’m sharing all of this because I want to do all I can to stop people from falling for these kind of scams, and also because I found my lightbulb moment about it all so freeing: 

This only matters if I give a crap!

Perhaps there’s something stressing you out right now that you could apply this same principle to? If so, I hope you find it equally freeing.

As part of my valued Wonderstruck community I’d love you to also be a part of my minimalist Instagram experience. You can find my new account @siobhancurhamauthor and it looks like this…

Until next week, here’s to not giving a crap - in the best possible way!

Siobhan