An Attempt To Hack My Telegram Account.

Cyber crime has been around for a very lomg time before now; it did not start some few years ago. I remembered vividly many years back when my dad will pick up his phone to receive a call but will hiss and then hang up the call, he would murmur "these scammers should go and get a better job". That has happened several times. There have been cases similar to this since I was in my junior secondary school. These scams even have different for format to get to their targets.

There was a time one of their format was to call and pretend to be your bank manager, they'd ask some questions relating to your account details then tell you the bank will send a code to you while on the call. And truly a code will be sent to you while you're still on that call (but it's actually not from the bank) and you will be ask to call out the code for them. Once you call it out, they say thank you and end the call. It won't take up to 2 minutes before you start receiving debit alert on your phone from your bank. The code was to get access to your bank account and be able to withdraw money from their own end. This particular format went viral but these smart guys always come up with new ways to scam people. Another popular one was sending link through sms and attaching a very enticing offer to it. Once you click on the link to register for whatever was stated in the sms, your mobile number is gone and they have access to almost everything that was registered with your mobile number.

My Telegram account was almost hacked very early this month. I got an update from a friend in church about giveaways on Telegram. All I needed to do was join some channels of guys doing Degen and trading meme or shit coins, support them by liking, following, joining and commenting on any link or post they send to their channel, it could be a X link or a link to another telegram group. These guys reward their active subscribers with solana and I have won a few times. One particular day, a channel dropped a link and asked us to register our name and number, which I did. Just few secinds later, I received a notification that my telegram account has been registered on another device, the location was somewhere in the USA. I was scared at first and was thinking of what to do. Another notification popped up and this time it was from Telegram itself telling me to confirm if I was aware of the new device; also, they provide solution guide in case I wasn't the one who registered my account on another device.

I read the solution and luckily, I was able to deactivate my Telegram account from that new device. I was more than happy to recover my 5 years Telegram account. I would have lost it completely if I hesitated because the next thing the hacker would have done is to remove my gmail from the Telegram account. I went back to the Telegram channel where the link I clicked on was posted and left a comment advising everyone to avoid clicking on the link. The owner of the channel and some other guys said same thing happened to them and they were able to recover their account immediately because of the notification from Telegram.

That brought me to the consciousness that cyber crime is still very real, because I am not a victim doesn't mean it doesn't exists. Now, I have experienced it and I've been more careful about what I click on and how much of my details go out.

_{My response to the #hivelearners prompt for week 124, episode 2. You should check it out in the community}