As most of you know, I was HACKED on IG by a Russian hacker this week. Every bloggers worst nightmare. I have put my heart, passion and every extra minute I have into my blog this year. And in the blink of an eye it felt like it was gone forever.
It was 10 am on Sunday morning and Chris and I were headed out to shoot some looks for a campaign when I received an email from Instagram saying my email was changed for @mama_alamode. I didn’t think much of it and thought it was error until the next email came in right after it. This time, from my hacker, demanding that I contact him ASAP or he would delete everything. The last line read “Sorry for my moves.” SORRY!? How can he even say that!? He surely was NOT sorry. I emailed him right away in a panic and pleaded for him to not do anything to my account. He replied with “You have one hour.” WHAT!? it was just 3 hours! how am I going to solve anything in 1 hour! At this point I assumed I had one hour to pay him and I was right. He wanted my money.
SO I immediately thought to myself, “i’ll just call Instagram and tell them my situation and they will fix it.” NOPE not happening guys. Instagram does NOT have a have a customer support team to talk to on the phone. You have to go through a million steps to get to a million different forms and they don’t actually ever get back to you. Or at least in my situation they didn’t. I don’t want to bash IG because I do love it as my platform to engage with all of you but they need a better system when it comes to hacking and restoring accounts. You can’t tell me a billion dollar business can’t restore an account for you! I tried emailing them at their support email but kept getting an extremely annoying email back saying I’m contacting them through a way they don’t support anymore. UGH!
Okay next step, reach out to fellow bloggers and see if they know anything. EVERYONE I reached out to told me to check out the Lavenda’s Closet blog post about how to get your hacked IG back.
And this is where the happy stuff starts to come into play. I reached out to Lavenda personally and she got right back to me with the post and some encouragement and was so so sweet. I can’t take any credit for what I did from here on out because it was all thanks to Lavenda! Here is the post for you guys if you ever get hacked!
Basically she had the same exact situation I just explained happen to her and she discovered a man named Juan. Juan has recovered celebrity accounts and works with many other bloggers to recover theirs as well.(you can read all about how to contact him in her post). I thought that no way Juan was going to get back to me in time to save my account BUT low and behold he responded instantly to me! He walked me through step by step what he was doing and a few hours later MY ACCOUNT WAS BACK! He found where my hacker put my account and he restored it for me. (Obviously easier said than done)
Juan not only restored my account, but restored a little bit of my faith in humanity. He never asked me for a dime to recover my account, however I insisted on paying him for his services. I’m so grateful Lavenda told her story and wrote that blog post or all my hard work could have potentially been lost forever. So I’m keeping the chain going in hopes this can help someone someday too. IF YOU GET HACKED PLEASE GO TO THE POST LINKED ABOVE.
How To Protect Yourself In The World Of Social Media
- Make sure you have TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION ON!
- Do NOT use the same password for everything. I know it seems hard because everything requires a password today but trust me, if a hacker gets one, they can have them all!
- IF YOU GET HACKED on any social media accounts, immediately change your email password too since this is usually connected to the account and make sure two factor authentication is on!
- Don’t ever leave yourself signed in anywhere except your own devices/computer.
Being hacked is an extremely violating feeling and to be honest I’m still scared. Im grateful things did not end worse but if you find yourself in my situation and your IG gets hacked (its very common these days apparently) then stay calm. Freaking out makes things so much worse, I promise. If you follow all of Lavenda’s steps, I’m sure you’ll have a happy outcome too!
XOXO,
Morgan