Consider this a public service post!  It can happen to us all!

Upon first check of my email early yesterday morning, I had an order from Amazon for a $145 watch that was purchased from my account overnight.  The order was completed, charged to my debit card and was being processed for shipping.  I saw this 5 hours after the order was placed.  My EMAIL address on my account had changed to Benton1??6@????.com.  My address had been changed to a street address in Glendale, CA.    As many of you have experienced (this wasn’t my first time having this occur with another vendor), I felt the helplessness and violation of my privacy.  However, I knew what to immediately do.

I found the Amazon contact number.  Mind you, this was 4:50AM as I was heading to workout.  I dialed the number on my way to the gym, spoke with a customer service rep who immediately understood my issue.  She put me on hold for less than 2 minutes and when she came back she indicated this: “Mr. White, your account has been shut down, we have voided the attempted shipment, you have not been charged for anything and our security department will email you within 48 hours so you can reset your password, re-input your banking information and do any other updates to your account.”  THAT is how you handle this situation and Amazon gets an A+ for their service.

Within 1 hour (not 48), I had a long, thorough and very descriptive EMAIL on what I should do.  Basically, Amazon opened up a backdoor to my account so I could access it.  Then, they instructed that I change the password to some wild arrangement of characters, numbers & symbols to better protect me in the future from these – excuse me – IDIOTS that sit around and cause all of us these problems.

Interesting note: I KNOW how complicated passwords need to be.  I have a program that gives me top-flight, incredibly complicated passwords and those are what I use.  I can’t imagine ever having more secure passwords than what I use but guess what, one of my most complicated passwords was hacked during this event.  So – nothing is safe.  If we do internet, we take risks!  But what I know is that the reputable companies that participate in internet commerce are prepared, as Amazon was, to immediately reverse these types of issues.

So call me crazy (and many do!), but I still think we are as safe as we can be at this point dealing with cyberspace and the privacy thereof!  As the internet continues to grow, security will continue to get better.  This is a great example of the BAD happening and the GOOD quickly rising up!  Thought it might help you too!  I hope that it does!