Hubs think that I am a drama queen (OK, at this juncture, I gotta make a distinction between a drama queen as oppose to a drama magnet. A drama queen creates her drama while a drama magnet attracts hers, logical enough?) but I beg to differ.
In my lifetime so far, I have encountered some pretty unusual situations that most of the time I wondered how did that happened to me. For instance, in 2002, I got a job in KL that required me to relocate to the city. So here I was on the highway and until today, I still remember the spot when the accident hit. This was just after the Pagoh exit on the way to north when I was overtaking another car on the fast lane and I heard a loud "POP." The next thing I knew, my windscreen had cracked into many tiny lines that I could not even see the road in front. I had to turn on the hazard light and slowed my car to a stop and called for rescue.
Six month after that incidence, I made a date to go for my first clubbing in KL with new found colleagues. Till today, I have no idea why I decided to take a look at my driver's licence because that's when I found belatedly that it had expired for 6 months. I tried to renew it but couldn't because apparently it had been "renewed" but I just don't have that piece of paper with me. I had to make a police report that the card was stolen in order to get a new one. This incidence puzzles me till today because I seriously have not gone and renew and lost my driver's licence.
Then came 2004 which was a quite a bad year for me because my new car was stolen. The same went with my handphone as well, and it happened not once by twice within 3 months of each other. I still find it hard to believe that I'm a victim of car-theft because when my mom heard about it, she went like "Are you sure? Even your dad who has been driving around for donkey years has nothing of this magnitude happen to him!"
In 2007, just three months before we got married, our old condo was broken into and all cash and jewellery that we received prior to the wedding were stolen. And we didn't even know our condo was broken into because the thief removed everything carefully - before the theft, money were still in their angpow packets and the jewellery in the boxes, and they left the empty packets and boxes as if they were untouched. We realised that the thief(s) had intention to come back because they took our spare house keys as well. The only humour we saw out of that incidence was they were smart enough to leave the Indonesian rupiah behind but took remnants of Euro and USD that we had spare from overseas trips.
Since then, there have been a few spates of unfortunate incidences here and there but nothing of this magnitude until last Friday. I was woken up by a call from my mother, on behalf of my twin in the US, asking if I was OK. Apparently my twin had received a "distress email" from "me" that "I" was robbed of cash and cards while holidaying in Madrid. "I" had no money to settle hotel and transportation and "was" held at the hotel because of "my" inability to pay. I tried to log into my account after that and blardy hacker locked me out! The perp even initiated some changes on my email settings that made it difficult for me to recover my account. Like WT(F)!
For the next 1 hour, I had to log in a complain to Google that my account has been compromised, created another backup email to receive instructions from Google on step-by-step recovery, thought long and hard what sort of private information that I may have left inside my Gmail, changed all my banking passwords to be on the safe side, and answered numerous sms-es from concerned friends about the hack job and asked Hubs to inform his side of the family that my account has been hacked because his aunt in Australia had panicked and thought that we were really in trouble.
Kudos to Google for the speedy reply because within that hour as well, I also managed to recover back my email. Up front everything seems intact, but I know the perp has seen everything. I felt a bit uncertain if I want to continue using that account until Saturday when I saw all my contacts in the address book has been wiped out. So there I was again, creating a brand new account, keying in my contacts again (luckily I had most of their details on my phone as well) and informing everyone of my new email address. I had thoughts of deleting the old account altogether but that would mean this blog will go as well. After extensive search, I found a way to overcome this and now I'm blogging from my new account. Hurrah! Finally a silver lining. :)
At the same time, I did some amateur investigative journalism of my own. From the Last Account Acitivity link at the bottom left of the Inbox page, I managed to find out the perp IP address. I did a search on all the IP addresses below and found that it was registered to a "fred young" and when I googled the perp's name, there was a host of information of the numerous scams that the perp is involved in.
One of our friends actually replied to the "distress email" (I believe he wasn't naive nor gullible) but did so out of concern and curiosity. THE PERP ACTUALLY REPLIED BACK! Of course this was before I recovered my account and I have since saw the reply and man! it is insidious. The perp asked for Euro 1880 to be banked into a western union account somewhere Europe created under my name. It wasn't my legal name, of course but it just shows that these guys are really out for money.
Anyway I'm really thankful that nothing unfortunate happened, but this has certainly been an eye-opener for myself, family and friends alike not to take things for granted.
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