Okay I thought I was safe, I have antivirus on my phone, I have two step authentication for a lot of stuff however Rogers had not encrypted my port as yet and so my SIM card got hijacked. Before I could put a halt to all that went on they also managed to hack my PayPal account and make an online purchase for $1,400.

So some things I think people might want to know that no one really says in any of the articles I’ve read.

First of all – the order of things:

1.     Cancel all your credit cards and bank cards immediately! Yes, it’s going to be a hassle to replace them but you have no idea how deep the hack has gone so cover your assets!

2.     Call the police – although this is merely a going through the motions process, you should file a police report with cyber crimes. In Toronto they will call you back in 4 or 5 days so obviously this is not enough but it’s a good start.

3.      Change all your important passwords – this may seem like a laborious task (and it is believe me – I think I spent about 5 hours total on this alone) but again, better safe than sorry. Anywhere you can implement two-factor authentication, do it.

4.               Set up notifications for any changes on any websites you can. This way any time your password gets changed or something is off, you will get notified.

5.      They say don’t write down your passwords but how the fuck are you supposed to remember them all? Okay you can do one of two things, you can use an encrypted program that stores all your passwords – personally this made me feel more vulnerable – or create a document that is password protected that has your passwords in it. This is what I did.

One of the things that I found truly disconcerting was that after I got my number back from Rogers (the hijackers had transferred it over to Bell) and asked them if there was anything I should be doing further they just said no, everything’s fine. The police were also useless. No suggestions, no steps of procedure, bupkus.

By the way PayPal was also utterly fucking useless and didn’t help me whatsoever. I did manage to contact the merchant and get the purchase refunded that way.

Oh yes, and another sage piece of advice I did receive along the way, if a fraudulent purchase has been made, you are best off contacting the merchant to put a stop to it. Makes sense really but you are usually inclined to call the credit card company or the bank. The only reason I ended up going this route was I had already cancelled my cards and had no other recourse, a very happy accident.

I hope this helps someone should they come across this situation in their lives. Good luck! Stay safe! And being hyper vigilant and a little paranoid might serve as a bonus in this instance.