It all started last week, when a mysterious text in German presented me with a verification code with which to log into my TikTok account. Danke!
I smelled a rat. Then, when I tried to log in a few minutes later, I was locked out completely. My password had been changed, and so was the phone number and email associated with my account. I’d been hacked – game, set and match.
Now, I’m no stranger to crime. Over the course of my journalistic career, I’ve interviewed drug dealers, terror suspects and acid attack perpetrators. I’ve been mugged once and had my phone snatched out of my hand twice in the last decade. But hacking was something I thought happened to clueless boomers who reuse easy-to-guess passwords, or fall for email phishing scams from Nigerian princes and distant relatives suddenly proffering vast sums of wealth. It turns out it can happen to anyone – and more people than you think are victims.
Last year saw a 57 percent increase in social media and email account hacking in the UK, according to Action Fraud, the national fraud and cybercrime reporting service. It’s the most common form of cybercrime – and it’s financially ruinous too, with victims losing £1.4m to it last year alone.
Then there are the emotional repercussions of being hacked. Strangely, I felt more shaken by the TikTok hacking than the time I was literally physically assaulted and mugged. I’d been on the social platform for five years and built up a modest audience. I used it to post news explainers and glimpses into my daily life as a working journalist in London. I’d even posted a video of my mum’s cats.
Now my hacker knows what I look like, where I’ve been on holiday and how I arrange the posters on my living room wall. They can see the food videos I’ve saved and the private messages I’ve sent to friends. If they wanted to, they could probably reconstruct a note-perfect picture of my life, right down to what I like to cook for dinner.
It may seem overdramatic to say I feel violated, but that’s exactly how I feel. The aftereffects of my mugging were relatively self-contained: I had to go to hospital but didn’t require stitches, and I felt nervous for a few months whenever I had to walk down the same street. But getting hacked split my world open.
Suddenly, everything I do online pulsates with paranoia and anxiety. Are my other accounts safe? What else does my hacker know about me? Are they messaging people I know, pretending to be me? At one point, the criminal responsible changed my TikTok username for a meaningless string of letters and numbers, which meant that my account didn’t show up when I searched for it online. Half a decade of videos, gone. Footage of my face was now in the hands of some anonymous criminal to do whatever they wanted with – and there was nothing I could do about it.
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I never guessed that I would grow this attached to a social platform. If this had happened five years ago, I probably would have shrugged and just set up another account. But as our online and offline lives increasingly converge, there’s no longer a clear-cut separation between the two.
My offline self and my online identity may differ slightly in presentation, but they’re both essential parts of my personality. All of which means that getting hacked isn’t just an annoyance – it feels like a part of me has disappeared with it. Forums like r/TikTokHelp on Reddit are full of desperate users who feel like I do. “Nine years of memories, saved recipes down the drain,” wrote one user.
What does my hacker want? Reader, you tell me. Judging by the reports of other victims, cybercriminals usually use stolen accounts to shill crypto scams, go on TikTok Shop splurges or cross-promote their own network of accounts. Some users have been held to ransom, with hackers telling content creators like Gypsy Rose Blanchard to cough up hundreds of dollars in order to retrieve their account.
Thankfully, that hasn’t happened to me yet. I recently discovered my account masquerading under a new username and am watching it like a hawk. I reported the hack to TikTok, but haven’t received anything save for a brief message to say they were looking into it.
So if you run into me online, telling you that I’ve come into a large sum of money or urging you to sign up for a new crypto coin, be warned – it may look, sound and talk like me, but es ist mein German hacker.
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