Okay, well, I have a mildly interesting story. My fiance's best friend, one day, could not sign into his instant messanger. At all. He never could again. So he finally got a new screenname. One day, my fiance was online, and saw his friend's old screenname get online...

To make a long story shorty, this guy had bought it from someone who had hacked it and changed the password and erased the buddy list, claiming that it was one of his old screennames. Now... why would someone pay for a screenname? It's not like it was anything special...

Now I'm worried that it might have happened to me. I have a couple of screennames, my main one being the one that's listed in my bio here. And for some reason, it won't let me sign into it this morning. I was on itlast night, and it was fine, but this morning... Nada. But my other screennames, and my brother's screenname... Those are all fine.

Has anyone else heard of this AIM screenname hacking? I really hope it hasn't happened to me... I have enough things to be peeved about right now. (Like a non-working laptop.) I guess I don't know if my screenname really got hacked or anything, but it certainly got me thinking about it.

-Ri

All I can say is keep trying to sign in on different machines. If it still doesn't work, I suggest you worry about it. Crap like that sucks, I already know that one guy has been screwing with my MSN screenname as it is.

"HURRY HURRY HURRY! BE THE FIRST TO GET YOUR HANDS ON AN EXCLUSIVE SCREENNAME! YES, YOU CAN BE THE FIRST ONE ON YOUR BLOCK TO BE 'sexyasianlover101'! GET IT TODAY!"

Whoopee crap. Shouldn't these people be pirating video games or something? You know, something with VALUE?

That's kinda what I thought, HD... But at least I was, in fact, not hacked myself. The computer was being a butt. As computers are wont to do.

-Ri

Edited by Rioni Seres on August 25, 2006 at 20:35:54.

Why'd you post a topic about it today, though, Ri? It happened, like, some time ago. <_<

Because for a few minutes, I thought it'd happened to me this morning. e_e

-Ri

Oh.

Let this be a WARNING, fellow people of the Internet! People CAN make off with your username!



Edited by The Helldragon on August 25, 2006 at 22:07:24.

Hey, we're just finding out about it now, but I bet the guys who got names like "Sepirothfan" and "Atrocity" without having to put extra characters or anything in them found out a long time ago. :hehe:

The only real problem as I see it would be if people saw that person and thought it was you, if you had your information on your account, or if they used your buddlist to find your family who are in your buddy list... besides the fact, of course, that you have to sign up a new screenname.

This happened to me in 2002.

My username of HollowZero was hacked into, and the hacker signed into it and spammed people with it that were on my buddylist. Real mature (but I admit I wasn't being mature either, hahahahahha)..

In late 2003, someone mentioned to me that I could probably get the name back if I asked AOL for it, and the hacker didn't change my email (which he didn't). So yeah, I got my username back after a long while.

Always have backup names to sign onto just incase, is what I sez.

o.o;; That's not cool. I guess I'll get a backup account and add the buddy lists to those. Like a few weeks ago, someone IMed me and was like "Good morning Latrine!" and I explained to them that they had the wrong screenname (kinda like having the wrong phone number, haha.) Anyways they even asked for a few other people that might own the screenname.

one of my screennames were hacked at one point. I was able to get the password back and everything back cuz it was my friend who hacked it so......everything went out good for me in the long run although some cases dont go as smoothly as mine did.