Before I begin, a PSA: if you use the same password for both your Facebook and e-mail accounts, stop reading this right now and go change one of them.
Finished? Good. I’ll get on with the story. As we were touring towns in Cantabria with the rest of the Bolados, someone in Nigeria was hacking into my Facebook and Gmail accounts and sending all of my contacts an e-mail claiming that we were in Wales, had been robbed of everything, and could you please send us $2,500 to settle the hotel bill?
Thankfully, most of my friends and family knew we were in Spain, not Wales. The atrocious grammar in the message was also a dead giveaway. Also, $2,500 on one hotel bill? Seriously? We were certainly not traveling on that kind of budget. The entire thing was ridiculous. Luckily, no money was transferred.
Later that evening, I managed to regain control of my Gmail account, a relatively painless process. Facebook was a different story — that took several e-mails and a few days.
The most amusing part was reading the e-mails people had written in response, from the friend who responded in Spanish to see if it really was me to my father, ever the jokester, who repeatedly asked, “How are the kids?”
Oh well. Everything turned out fine, and I learned my lesson: diversify the passwords.
