This is called hacker. I'm twenty four years old and I'm from a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada. I keep my social circle very small, just a few friends and my coworkers. Really. I mentioned that as a point in saying that I don't really know anyone who would be out to get me in any way. I browse read it a lot in my free time, and I'm an active poster. There was this one night when I pulled up readit on my browser out of boredom, and I had a new message, which was not unusual because I'd have people message me in reference to my post quite often. It was a message request from some random account, and oddly enough, it was a now deleted username. The message said check your email. Make sure you check your spam folder. I replied back, huh, why who is this? In the meantime, I opened my Gmail and went to my spam folder. There's one email that stuck out from the rest titled in all caps, I know who you are. I opened the email and it was basically a paragraph full of all my personal information, including my full name, my Reddit password, my home address, along with other threats. Basically, whoever said this email was asking for a one time payment of five thousand dollars through bitcoin to a specific bitcoin wallet address. My heart was in my throat at this point in time. I had a terrible feeling of helplessness, in like the entire world was collapsing in on me. The first thing I did was cover my webcam with a piece of tape. Secondly, I went back to Reddit to see if the user had ever answered my message, and they hadn't. I went to report the account on Reddit as quickly as I could, as if that would even do anything. I replied to the email, copying and pasting the exact same message i'd sent the person and read it on my Reddit account, asking who is this, how they got my information and if this was a prank. I got an email back around five minutes later, in an all caps saying no, it's not a prank. We have all your information, including where you live, so your best course of action is to do exactly what we say and you'll never hear from us again. Obviously, I was not going to show out five thousand dollars. I don't even make a lot of money to begin with. I contacted all my friends asking them if it was any of them, begging them just to come forward before I call the police. None of them admitted to it, so given that threatened to call the police, I knew it was none of them. I tried to think of anyone at work who might have an issue with me, but I get along with everyone at work. I chalked it up to my password somehow being stolen by a malware or a hacker, and through that they somehow got the rest of my information. The main question was do I pay the money, and that was absolutely not going to happen. I forced myself to go to sleep. I left my laptop off the whole next day. I used my desktop instead. After getting home from work, I didn't sign into Reddit or anything, though I did, however, change my password on all the other websites and apps. I finally signed into my laptop late that night because I was just so bored and curious, curious but nervous to see if anything had changed and if I had gotten any new emails. I signed on and everything on my computer still looked normal. So I went to Reddit and I saw the user who messaged me was now deleted, and then went to a subreddit which talked about computer hackers and scams and such, and I posted my experience. At some point, I noticed the task bar at the bottom of my screen turned darker. Curious, I minimized all windows, and my desktop wallpaper was different. I knew right away what it was because I recognized outside of my bedroom window showing the white frame of outside my window, and in the picture there was a flash of the camera and inside that it also caught me laying in my bed sleeping. Some seconds later, a popup window appeared along with the normal windows air beep sound that comes up when this happens, the message dread hey with a winky face emoji with it. I closed my laptop scream and forced the computer off by holding down the power button. I also pulled my blinds down and called my parents. I told my dad over the phone that some hacker got all my information, and he came over right away with his truck to help me load any valuables I could think of into his truck to stay with them for a while. Before we drove off off from my apartment. My dad yelled out like a madman into the night sky, basically threatening whoever was hacking me. It was definitely a scene but I was too preoccupied with worry to be embarrassed by it. I saved with my parents for a few weeks and used my mom's computer when needed. I blocked that email address. This sent me the original email. I finally got back to my apartment a few days ago. I'm still very scared to hear a knock, get my window, or get another threatening email. I haven't brought it to the police yet, as I'm hoping all this was just a bluff to try to get me to pay. Yeah, so that's that's rough. You definitely want to take cybersecurity very seriously because, like, there's just a lot of crazy people out there. I was actually watching a video today on how easy it is to get everybody's information. This guy, you know, showed how you just go to like a coffee shop, set up like a hundred dollars piece of equipment, and every person who logs in onto the Wi Fi there, you get their passwords, you get their emails, and then from there you can escalate and grab more stuff like getting a secure shell onto their computer and start messing with stuff like changing the wallpaper. Totally doable with a little tiny bit of training that you can find completely free on the internet. Yeah, but they went to his house. Yeah, that's a bit much, but that's the whole other level of I mean just yeah, Like another thing about like that kind of stuff is you definitely do want to coach the police about that. And there's really, yell, not a whole lot you can do by yourself, you know, in that situation, And definitely good idea to get out of that area because they're taking pictures of you, You're laying in your bed sleeping. That in the window, that's just you know, you imagine seeing that, like you just open up your your your wallpaper on your desktop. Is you and your bed sleeping. Clearly someone who knew where he lived. And I would I would say, you know, in addition to like going to the police, you know, I would say definitely, like, you know, don't there's really no reason to pay these people because they're crazy. You know that they're doing crazy things and you're not going to get You're not gonna give it any kind of peace from them. You think it was someone he knew. Possibly they could be I take this out. It's a bit what it was me. I think it's possible something like that happened, so I actually said so, aw, so I do wonder. I mean, it's possible. Like what he doesn't say though, is if he has like a computer savvy friend, right, Like that'd be the first person you'd think of. But how far do you take it? You know, I don't know. I think the bitcoin thing for me almost makes it seem more legitimate because you do see so many of these bitcoin scams happening. Yeah, I know. It's such an easy way to hide transactions of money. There's a thing called like a crypto funnel or crypto vortex, and you basically you put bitcoin into it and you pull different bitcoin out. Yeah, it's online obviously, but this is way of hiding where it's going. Just totally launders some money in seconds. I personally haven't had this happen to me yet. I don't know if you guys have had any issues of this, but not to this extent obviously, but the thought of that it could easily happen, it's pretty pretty terriful. I haven't had, you know, specifically with bitcoin. I've had my identity still on year years ago, and that was a whole process of dealing with that. Obviously, this is far more intense and far more extreme. But you know, it's not a great feeling, so definitely happens. I don't remember the statistics off the top of my head. If you hear it all the time, how common it is. And this person definitely had a terrifying one. So it lives in a cool sunding place, Nova Scotia. Yeah, oh, I was gonna say it's very common. But a thing that's very interesting about it is a lot of you will feel like they are ashamed that they get their identity so on. And that's like the number one thing that hackers rely on is that you are too ashamed to tell people or to tell authorities. It's absolutely the wrong thing to do. You must tell people, you must let them know. But it's a big deal with people getting their identity so on, to be just like afraid or sad or just they you know, go in on themselves feeling that they made a mistake. It's not their fault. It's the person who's doing it that's the terrible person. And anyway, I just was to say that because it comes up so often. You know, people get there doing this all like you said, all the time, So I just want to say that, thank you, Thank you. Lucas very reassured those of you listen out there. Luke feels for you. It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. Just learn from your mistakes and yeah, Jeff Townsend, media sees you. Good night. And the question is do I stay here? Will you be back? Are you gonna come back? Will you be back? Are you coming back?
