I signed up for a Plenty of Fish (POF) account. I wanted to check out how the dating scene works again.
Well, my account got hacked last night. The person changed my profile photos. I became a black woman with a height of 5'5". In reality, I am Asian and am five inches taller than that.
I noticed a number of POF notification e-mails coming in about men being interested in me. I didn't get it. It wasn't until I signed into my POF account where I found out that some, but not all, of my answers in my profile were changed.
This person cannot write for beans. It is likely why my profile description remained the way that it was. This person was likely trying to get credit card information. I have a free account, thankfully.
I actually saw conversations between the fraudster and other men happen right before me. I changed my password immediately. It took a while for the other person to be kicked off the system.
To be certain that this person wouldn't be able to hack into my account, I changed my password again a few hours later. The crazy thing is that my original password seemed pretty secure. Obviously, it wasn't.
I will wait a couple of days before logging back in. The notifications have since ceased. After this experience, I'm not sure if I truly want to go back on this dating app.
If your password was reasonably secure (at least 13 characters if random; four randomly selected words if using the XKCD method) and unique to that site (that is, you are not using the same password at more than one site) then I would suspect the security breakdown is something other than the password. Notify the POF customer service/webmaster/security contact that they may have a breach of their password system, and also scan all your own computer systems with at least two different malware scanners.
ReplyDeleteMidwest Reader
Thanks for your suggestions and insight, Midwest Reader. I truly appreciate your help.
DeleteIt appears that POF account hacks are sadly the norm after doing some research online. It is a maze trying to contact someone at POF, but I managed to contact POF through e-mail. Here's hoping that I hear a response soon.