— ENTRY 010 —

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。

Hello agaiinnn,

Yeah, two consecutive entries, don't think this'll be the new normal haha. I don't have much time to work on my website, sorryyyyyy.

I wasn't expecting something to happen yesterday, but it did. And I think it would've been lovely for this entry to be written (and hopefully posted) the 26, but I was working on the previous entry sooooo... yeah. Don't worry nobody bad happened to me, it was very chill mentally haha. It's a more "lol. what." situation. That sounds really bad but will probably just end up as an anecdote.

A bit of context, my parents' email got hacked once (I will refer to it as lovelyparents@email.com). They were able to recover it, kinda, like, the mail works and they have access to it and were able to change the password and everything, but whenever we try to log in from another device it tells us we can because "we tried to many times, try again later" (weeks have happened and that's not "later" enough???).

Anyway, back when the email was on the hands of hackers, they logged in to my parents' Wallapop account and changed the account's email and phone number (I will call this mail grrrdirtyhackers@email.com). And we can't change it back because to change your mail, to lovelyparents@email.com in this case, you have to go to your old email and confirm... and the email this confirmation is sent to grrdirtyhackers@email.com, a mail that is not ours, ykwim??

So, we didn't want to have a random's email in Wallapop because they can see some private information like the phone number and where we live. And we made a new account with a different mail (altmailmyparentshave@email.com) and started putting all our products there: some old school books, a couple shirts.

We almost immediately received DMs with "people interested". That should've been a red flag, so many "people" quickly messaging us the second we post a product. But my parents didn't use to tag things correctly, like write the ISBN for books, for example, and I tagged it correctly in the new account, so I thought that was why more people found us.

The thing is one of them was SUPER suspicious. I mean, they all were, but one specially was like "hey my brother wants to buy this, message him via WhatsApp: +69 690 42 42 42" and my parents sent them a message, they didn't respond. And my parents received an SMS that stated "someone wants to buy your product, please verify your payment method so they can send me the money". (I'm paraphrasing everything, btw, they were a tad bit more formal).

That was the REDDEST flag ever, but I didn't even notice because I was uploading products on my laptop, while my dad was on the phone talking to the "people". That was honestly on me, if I had paid more attention to the actual messages, and told my dad that it sounded like a scam, I could've prevented what happened next.

My dad clicked the link, a website that imitated the UI of Wallapop pretty well (I could only find a couple differences) told him to verify the credit card by transferring €200 to them, with the promise that they would return the money after 15 minutes. Of course, it was a lie, and I honestly have no idea how my dad fell for it?? Because he didn't tell us about this website, just read the messages out loud and said something like "oh, Wallapop messaged me to confirm the payment method", so I thought it was the real Wallapop because it made sense, we had just made the account and my dad had just added a payment method.

Which is also why I suppose these bots only message people who have created their account recently, we didn't get these types of DMs on our other account, just real people.

Anyway, yeah, he got scammed, I only found out 15 minutes later because my dad said something among the lines of "they're not returning the money, and the AI assistant is telling me to give them 150 more euros" and that was the moment my brain went "w h a t" and also my dad's, who, finally noticed something was off about the whole thing.

I told him to not do that (literally, I remember saying "don't do that" with the most autistically monotone voice, because it was more of an automatic reaction than something I planned to say, and so my brain didn't have time to mask), of course, and we sat down to explain in great detail what had happened because we were going to report the whole situation to the police, so our bank could return us the money (this is why insurances are important, guys).

Skip skip, my dad and I called the bank. Turns out for the bank to cover the scam the money has to have been transferred to the scammers, and at the moment it was only withheld (don't ask me the difference, because even if the money was withheld we no longer had it) and that process takes a maximum of 8 days, or something like that, so we're waiting!

I'm not particularly worry about this because of our insurance, and I have everything screenshotted if they need proof (that I don't even think I'll need to show because the money transfer is logged, but just in case the bank tries to tell us it was not a scam and my dad paid those randoms willingly). But I wanted to write about it because I need more entries that aren't full of angst lmao

Ok, that's it, byeeee

Sincerily,