I don't post on Reddit. My last post if you look was five years ago and it was a dumb MHA meme.
Yesterday my Microsoft account got stolen. Not my password. They used some device code trick to steal my session token. Bypassed my two-factor authentication like it was nothing. Then they grabbed my phone number and tried to charge $1,500 to my PayPal through Walmart. I genuinely woke up to this and had no clue what was even going on initially until it clicked, and I started to panic as you’d usually would.
I figured out what happened. I wrote a post warning people in a subreddit dedicated to scams. I wasn't rude. I wasn't asking for sympathy. I just wanted to help after I managed to get my shit back to normal and contacted the proper channels to resolve the financial issue.
And this was what I got:
People accused me of downloading sketchy software. I didn't.
People said my post was written by AI because it was too organized. I'm a college student. That's just how I write, and I didn’t want to force random people to sit through emotional and incoherent writing when its sole purpose was to be an informative piece.
Someone spammed a canned response about a completely different scam that had nothing to do with what happened to me.
One person kept moving the goalposts no matter how many times I explained the actual attack.
And finally a moderator removed my post for being "off topic." In a subreddit about scams. A post about a scam. Off topic.
I haven't posted on Reddit in almost half a decade. This was my warm welcome back.
I'm not mad about downvotes. I'm mad that I tried to help people and got treated like I was the problem. Like being a victim of what was basically a cyber crime isn't enough. You also have to be confused and helpless or else you're lying or showing off.
I know not every corner of this site is like that. But that experience genuinely sucked. I'm just tired. No damn wonder I stopped engaging with other users on this site years ago.