Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
A hacker ripped me off for $10,000. The scam turned out to be brilliant — and terrifying.
Verizon, Chase, and the police were all useless when my identity got hacked. Then Psycho Bunny came to the rescue.
It was a Friday in July when I first noticed something seemed off. I was spending some time with my family on a gorgeous summer day, swimming and drinking beer and ignoring my phone as much as possible. When I finally checked my notifications, I had two alerts from Verizon. Both contained authorization codes — the kind of security measure they take when you make changes to your account. There was also a receipt from Verizon for $0 and a message thanking me for activating my new device.
I immediately checked my Verizon account, but nothing seemed amiss. The receipt seemed like a glitch — as if Verizon had belatedly billed me for the phone, which I'd activated four months prior. In hindsight, I should have been more suspicious. I should have called Verizon right away. But why would I want to spend the day in customer-service hell when I could spend it on a boat?
The next morning, though, something else strange happened. When I went to send a text, I realized I didn't have service. I tried flipping cell service on and off, restarting my phone — nothing. I couldn't text and I couldn't make calls. I asked my fiancé to check for a local Verizon outage, but nothing turned up. I wondered whether maybe I was just in a dead zone, but I'd never had this problem before. And then I started to feel that slowly dawning sense of dread.
