Robbed! Beware with Facebook adds!!!!

Okay, this is sour.  Some assholes stole about 500 EUR from my Paypal account the past days.

I'm not putting the blame on someone, but here is a reconstruction of what happened basically.  Some unknowing person, not awear of some of the dangers social media can pose to computer security, clicked some advertisement on Facebook, without any bad intentions.

This resulted in a wormvirus managing to wriggle it's way past my security, and on both the 17th and the 18th I apparently authorized a payment of over 300 USD each to 'Facebook, Ireland Ltd' for 'Facebook Ads' through Paypal.
Now, I can give a whole, very technical explanation fo how this works, but let's just keep it at the classic 'beware what you click'!!!! or even better 'DON'T CLICK THOSE ADDS!!!!'
They aren't bad by themselves, but you don't know what might be piggybacking them...

This resulted in 600+ USD going down the drain, being my total amount on my Paypal  balance, as well as charging the MasterCard for almost 500 euros.

Paypal contacted me yesterday with a notification that 'some unusual behaviour' was taking place on my account, so I immediatly filed claims, and notified the bank that handles the Credit Card.

The result after an evening of high stress, and a midday of various mails:

* The Credit Card is blocked, and as such the number destroyed.  This means we'll have to get a new one, and I will be needing to change all the entries on things like the Playstation Network, Paypal, various sites where I regularly shopped, try to figure out again how it all worked on a Japanese shop site, etc etc.  Happy times ahead - not...

* Paypal is blocked and empty, because those assholes took it all, and I need to make a payment actually quite urgently to avoid negative feedback of a model I bought.  I've contacted the seller and hope he understands, but at the same time I hope it will all be okay soon.

* I lost 500 euros at the moment.  Sure, IF Paypal accepts the claims and sees I'm strzaight in my shoes, they will refund it.  But then the joke starts of trying to refund it to a card that is now no longer existant, so on the one hand I have to hope it doesn't resolve to soon so I can attach the new card to the account, on the other hand, I just want to clear it out as son as possible.

* If that fails, I can file a claim with my bank.  Now, my card 'resets' every half of the month, so I hope that part can be handled out before this happens, or I'm paying up for the transaction costs percentage of those 500+ euros, and that is something I cannot recuperate through a claim.  At 8 percent, that is a trip to a restaurant down the drain.

* Now, I know this is going to be alright, but even IF that fails on top, I'm fucked.  That will mean it's 500 euros gone, a lot of auctions have been 'free gifts then' as the balance has emptied, and I will have turned up for all the shipping costs for that same reason.

I'm not mad with the person who did all this to me by accident, by I did promise the person in question that there is now a 5 yard 'NO ACCESS ALLOWED' perimeter around my PC ;-)

Oh well, better keep on smiling and keep that chin up, misery enough in the world and it is only money, but heck, there would have been cooler things to do with such an amount...








Which brings me to this:

As many have already heard, I'm laying down my guns and have stopped raiding the internet on the prowl for treasures beyond imagination.

Because, well, I rather want to have one impressive collection instead of several smaller half ones.

But that also means that the Society is going to throw open it's massive *kuch* armoured vaults and share the wealth of all that has been gathered over the past years (well, or at least a lot of it) with all those that have paid for a ticket to watch our exhibitions.

So head over to the new tab above in the header, labelled unimaginatively 'The Vault' and see if there is anything you like in our Storehouse of Geekiness...

I was planning to do a nice blogpost about that and the new page added to the Society site, but ironically enough, it all has to go a bit in a speeding up modus, as like I said, I need to be able to pay some eBay bills right now, and I can't charge either the credit card, nor send up money from the bankaccount linked to said card.

Oh well; I'll keep you all posted how this all ends up... just remember, DON'T CLICK.