Downside of Facebook

Yesterday morning I received an email from a friend in Toronto. Someone had sent a private message in Facebook, using my account, telling her I’d been mugged in London and needed $700. A few minutes later I received a call from a friend in the office of my church, another friend had called her, asking if I was in London and may need help. He too had received the PM on Facebook.

I tried to log in to Facebook, but whoever had hijacked my account had changed my password and email address. I have no way to change my password or access my account. So I reported the incident to Facebook via one of their security forms. I received an email from them to confirm my email address for the account. And since then, nothing. Not a word, not an email, not a phone call. I still can’t access my account and I fear now that I never will be able to. Because if the hijacker changed the email associated with the account, who looks like they don’t belong here? Me.

While I’m out here, without access, my friends are vulnerable not only to repeated bogus communications from me, but to being scoped out to be victims themselves.

If you use Facebook, go now and change to an extremely hard password–no words, series of 10 or more numbers and letters that are apparently random. And be sure you keep your status up to date. Fortunately, most of my friends were able to see that I’d had no intention of traveling, or knew that if I were in trouble in London, I have a friend just an hour away who’d take care of me.

I’m worried I’ll never get back in. And that I’ll lose touch, in particular, with old friends I’d lost and found, but never bothered to move to my email address book. Facebook is a nice tool, until someone else decides to use it for gain, then the folks at Facebook apparently have no real impetus to correct the issue and you’ll be stuck, like I am.

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