Account hacker update#

IвЂ™m pretty sure I know how this happened, so IвЂ™m happy (and embarrassed) to share it with you so youвЂ™ll have better internet security hygiene than I did. That means those thousands of dollars will come out of my pocket in one form or another. If not, they (and all the other businesses that cover hacked account expenditures) need to make it back somehow - and usually, customers end up having to cover those costs in some way. I donвЂ™t know if my bank, Grubhub, or Caviar were able to get any of the stolen money back. I also had a few bill pay services linked to a closed account I didnвЂ™t switch over in time, and now IвЂ™m on some kind of scofflaw list at E-ZPass. I was terrified I would lose my health insurance coverage. And even losing that money temporarily was still a big, scary inconvenience: I had bills to pay and no way to pay them. Fortunately for me, the money was refunded to my credit card.Д«ut just because I was lucky enough to get my money back in full, it doesnвЂ™t mean you will if hackers ever target you. And someone got away with $77.07 of rustic street food from one of Eater San FranciscoвЂ™s top Oakland Vietnamese restaurant picks. For some reason, my card transferred some (but not all) purchases made on the expired card that was attached to my account to my current one. Having a pretty good idea of where this was going, I checked my credit card and found that while the $323.01 charge was declined, two charges of $1.64 and $75.43 from Caviar had gone through. A month later, in September, I received an email from my credit card company informing me that it declined a $323.01 charge that Caviar tried to put on an expired card. Fill out this form to contribute to our reporting.Д«ut it wasnвЂ™t over. Open Sourced is Recode by VoxвЂ™s year-long reporting project to demystify the world of data, personal privacy, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Join the Open Sourced Reporting Network Christina Animashaun/Vox Obviously, things could have been a lot worse: I did get the money back.

Account hacker update#

When I called them for an update and to demand justice, they told me they couldnвЂ™t tell me any details about the case because I was not the victim, the bank was. I donвЂ™t know if my bank got the $13,000 back or just fronted me the money and called it a loss.

It took about two weeks before everything was fully up and running again and my $13,000 was restored. She was right, although my access to all of my money was cut off for several days as the bank froze my old, violated accounts and created new ones. The woman on the other end of the line had a pleasant Southern drawl, which made her promises that I would get the money back seem extra reassuring. During the subsequent, frantic call to my bank, I looked at my checking account and saw that $4,000 had been wired away from there, too - a discovery I declared with a variety of curse words. Sure enough, $9,000 had been wired away two days previously. It was not.ДЇive months later, I logged into my bank account to find a substantially smaller number in my savings account than I expected. Then I changed my password, sent an angry text to the phone number on the food order, and went about my life, foolishly thinking that this was an isolated incident. At first, it was annoying but didnвЂ™t seem like that big of a deal: I notified Grubhub about the fraudulent charge and got a refund. The person who hacked my Grubhub account last March ordered a black fungus salad with celery, a five-spice-marinated beef entree, and 12 pork dumplings (with chives) for a total of $26.84. And while this doesnвЂ™t make me, your Recode data privacy reporter, look very smart, IвЂ™m sharing my story with you in the hope that it will help you avoid a similar fate.

And there was: mine.Д«ecause I didnвЂ™t take a few basic internet security precautions, hackers robbed me of $13,103.91 worth of cash and prizes from three of my accounts over the next six months. When I got an email at midnight last March from Grubhub notifying me that my order from Dumpling Depot was on its way to an address 3,000 miles away from my location in New York City, I thought there must have been some mistake.