As a change of pace, rather than giving advice this week, I’m going to instead tell a personal story of a time that one of my accounts was hacked.

I’m a person who has more online accounts than I can keep track of. While most folks tend to focus their online efforts in social media or communication, I have a myriad of accounts solely for online gaming services. From Steam to Xbox Live, I have an account on just about every major platform. One of these is Origin, an online game distribution service run by Electronic Arts, a video game publisher known for many popular franchises including The Sims, Battlefield, and the Madden titles. I created my Origin account in 2011 in order to play Battlefield 3, and since then I had used the service to purchase over $200 worth of games.

Being someone who plays a lot of different video games, I eventually stopped playing my Origin games and moved on to a different service to play other things. There was a solid few years where I did not even touch my Origin account at all. Then, out of the blue one day, one of my friends suggest we return to Battlefield 3, and I was on board. That was until I tried to log into my Origin account. Attempt after attempt, my password just wouldn’t work. I thought that I had simply forgotten a quirk to my password, but using the “Forgot my Password” feature on EA’s website showed that something far more sinister had happened. After confirming some details, the site said that they would mail my replacement password to my email address, but the email address shown on the site was incorrect. It was an address I had never seen before. In fact, it was completely in cyrillic. I had been hacked by a Russian.

So at that point I went into full panic mode. I contacted support, sat on hold for an hour, and finally reached a representative. After asking me question after question, I couldn’t prove to the tech rep that I was who I said I was. The hacker had gone in and changed so much info about my account, that there was no way to trace it back to me. And just like that, all of my games, and a small part of my dignity, were gone. I was out hundreds of dollars, hours of progress, and even lost some friends (as I only ever contacted them through Origin’s chat service)

This really frustrated me. When I complained about the experience online, I thought I’d be met with sympathy, but all I got in return was “Well, you should have used Two-Factor authentication”. And ever since then, I have. Now, if possible, all of my accounts are protected with an extra layer of security, ensuring that if anyone were to try to gain access, I would be alerted immediately. The story doesn’t end here though. Months down the road, I found a receipt containing a serial number of one of my Origin games. Calling support back, I managed to use that serial number to prove my identity and recover my account. While the hacker did make off with some of my games though a trading process, I nearly recovered 100% of my library! As soon as the games were back in my possession, I of course enabled two-factor authentication and said goodbye to the no-good Russian hacker to took a joy-ride on my account. To this day, I still get alerts on my phone that Russian IPs are attempting to log in to my Origin account, and they get the boot every time 😀

Do you have an interesting hacking story? Let us know in the comments below.
-Harris