Hacked*

A friend of mine texted me yesterday morning to tell me that he’d gotten a bizarre friend request on Facebook.

Someone with an Eastern European name (complete with different characters) had requested to add him as a friend, but it was MY face he saw attached to the name. I asked him to grab a screen shot and send it to me, and sure enough, there I was. As I racked my brain trying to figure out how this could have happened, I remembered my second Facebook account.

A while ago I created a Facebook account for my I Heart My Shoes page, so that I could still access it when I take a break from my personal profile. I have such a love/hate relationship with Facebook… I feel so much better when I’m off it, but at the same time, I love how easy it is to connect with others through it. It’s how my book club organizes our monthly get togethers, how some friends and I organize a night out, where I can go to get advice about anything and everything. But while I love some of the updates from my friends, I  also often find it so negative, and I get so sucked into the newsfeed… and it’s such a time waster for me.

Anyway.

I hadn’t logged into my Facebook blog account in a while, so when I went to check it, sure enough, someone else had hacked in. I went through Facebook security, got access to it again only to find that someone else had taken it over. I have to wait 60 days to be able to change the name back, and whoever had gone in had added a million random people. I tried removing some of the added people and canceling the friend requests, but there were too many… as well as a bunch of enthusiastic messages from men in Mexico calling me “Sweety” and wanting to “chat”.

Ugh.

It all felt like too much work to fix it so I ended up just removing privileges from my page and deactivating the account. I just can’t understand why people do this. I mean, what is the goal here? Is it just for kicks? A laugh? Do people wake up in the morning and think, “I’m bored. I’m going to hack into someone’s Facebook account, change the name and add hundreds of random people for fun. MUAHAHA.”

…because I can think of far better methods of entertainment, personally.

Is there another goal I’m not aware of? Do people make money doing this? I just can’t wrap my head around it. It does not compute in my brain.

It was all just so… annoying. It felt so unnecessary.

Anyway. That’s my rant for today. If you saw my face and a weird name pop up with a friend request recently, it wasn’t me.

And if I ever find out who it was, I will shake my fist at them like the crotchety old woman I am.