Yesterday someone hacked into my Paypal account. I started getting notifications in my email that various changes were being made, including my taxpayer id, my password, and my security questions, and sure enough, when I rushed over to the site I couldn't get in. I called Paypal and reestablished control over the account, but it was rather stressful.
Today the piece of shit who did that tried to enter the account again, but didn't succeed. That was enough to prod me to change the email address altogether.
Now all my passwords are all so different and so complicated I have this fear I've created an obstacle course in my own Internet usage. But the moral of the story is, don't use security questions that are easy to figure out! There are some nasty empty souls out there waiting to fill themselves up in the reflection of your pain...
In a different sort of crime, I Skyped with my husband today in Brazil and he told me that a friend of his, the owner of his favorite bar in our ex-town, Lagoinha, knifed (to death) some guy who attempted to kill him. This other friend of his who was one of our closest neighbors died sometime in the last few months due to some illness. It's sort of weird--I wonder, in my solipsistic mind, if something about our decision to leave sent a cascade of chaos into that little town, each little incident validating our (well, mostly my) choice. Better to not keep looking back, or someone's going to turn into a pillar of salt.
In my current isolated suburban existence time and space stretch out in a pleasant zombie dream, and I still am struggling through my revision. I have 30 pages left to revise to complete my 3rd draft, which I want to finish before the end of the month. I signed up for a Revision Hell in June and am planning to rewrite my shelved manuscript, "Croak". It's currently 110K words and I'm thinking of writing a much shorter and somewhat experimental version of it and seeing what happens.
Ugh, the internet is a great place some of the time, but a lot of the time it's a place where bad stuff like identity theft happens. I hope everything works out OK for you with that.
ReplyDeleteAs for Lagoinha--I'm glad you left. I think it's too weird that this is happening in São Paulo, I could easily see this happening in like, Pernambuco, some small town there, but in SP it seems really strange. I'm sure the new town where you're going will be fine. You'll be near Campinas, right??
Good luck on everything! Got my fingers crossed for you!
Abraços!
Alex
Thanks, Alex. Yeah, the ecovillage is near both Campinas and Sao Paulo. And it is weird about Lagoinha...it did feel very safe up until a few months ago, and the city was actually expanding and improving visibly. After that man got robbed, there was a surge of community initiative and a group got together a few times to try to ask the city for measures that would make it safer...but it went nowhere. But the city will have to do something otherwise no one will want to live there.
DeleteOhmigosh, I'm so sorry about your Paypal nightmare! Gah, I live in serious fear of having that kind of problem. Glad you were able to sort it out quickly. And good luck with your revisions! I've got a novel I've decided needs a *lot* of revising but am feeling a bit terror-struck by the idea of actually *getting to it*.
ReplyDeleteSome Dark Romantic
Thanks, Mina!
DeleteI hadn't even thought about how easy it was to hack into my account. I made my security questions easy enough for me to remember--because I'm always forgetting the answers to my own questions. Unfortunately they were so easy that a stranger could figure them out. Now I've done complicated ones and written down the answers. Anyhow...a bit of fear is healthy for protecting one's identity!