My Email Was Hacked

Oh My Gosh! What a pain this was!

One morning I woke up to a couple emails saying "your account password has been changed". I didn't think anything of it and assumed they were spam. You know, the emails where they get you to click the link and then you really are being hacked?

A couple of days later, I got a similar email from another account. I deleted it as spam. Then about three days later, I got another one, but this is from an account I actually use and had just changed my password about a week prior.

I brought it to The Husband and we got it sorted it out. All secure, new password, no problems.

Then, on the following Sunday, I ordered some stuff from Amazon. Everything went through, no problems. About an hour later, I wanted to check something on my Amazon purchase and I was locked out. My account said I requested 2-factor authentication, which I didn't. I was effectively locked out!

When we called customer service, they proceed to tell me that I requested this and they sent the email to fix the problem. But I wasn't getting any emails. At this point we realized my email had been hacked.

Luckily, Amazon froze my account so no purchases could be made on the card on file and I had to start the very tedious process of changing all my passwords! And they all had to be different! Before this, I was one of those people who only used about 2 or 3 passwords for everything! Once my email was hacked, they just started trying that email combination with that password on "every" shopping website: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Banks, etc.

Luckily for me, with the exception of Amazon, I don't keep credit cards on file with any shopping sites. Otherwise, I imagine, I would have had big charges from Target and Walmart that I didn't make!

I was slowly able to get everything cleared up and all my passwords changed. Although Amazon was very quick to lock my account, they were the most difficult to deal with to get everything cleared up. Eventually, 4 days after we realized for sure my email was hacked, we were able to get everything straightened out. Thankfully, nothing was charged on any of my accounts.

This whole experience sucked, quite honestly! However, the timing of it was very helpful! Being on shelter-in-place gave me the time I needed to sort this whole mess out!

*This has been in my draft folder for 6 weeks. That's when this actually happened. I have been monitoring our credit card and any online accounts very closely and still haven't seen any unknown charges!