A few days ago, over $5,000 was taken from my savings account via bill payment for a credit card I do not own and is not under my name. I called my bank and they froze my account, told me to make a new account with a new username and password and they made a claim for the money I had lost. They told me I would hear back about the claim in 10-45 days.
Literally as soon as I got off the phone for the claim, my banking app notified me that several purches were made with my debit card outside of the U.S., I was unable to stop the first purchase (it was only $1.65) but I managed to stop two other ones that were around $60 each (the purchases were for gift cards on a website known as kinguin. I called the bank again and made a new claim and they closed my debit card
A few minutes later, I kept getting emails from various companies saying things such as "we recieved your payment for x" or "thank you for your purchase for x" when I went to go read these emails, they would immediatley dissapear. I immediatley changed my email password. Someone was accessing my email and signing up for different websites. I managed to rememeber a few of the websites from the few seconds that they appeared. I logged into those websites with my email and lo and behold, someone had been buying gift cards with my money. There was a $50 xbox gift card purchased from target, several gift card purchases from Newegg, and I found the Kinguin purchases I mentioned earlier. Looking through the websites, I found several mailing addresses and ip addresses in other states. I called my local police non emergency number and informed the authorities about the situation. An officer came and took notes on the addresses and ip's I had found, He told me to make a claim on an FBI website with my bank information.
The next day, I woke up to a notification from my bank that my balance was in the negatives. Since my debit card was closed, this individual was now doing online money transfers via paypal and xoom. I called my bank and they froze my checkings account and made a claim on the money I had lost. The person on the phone told me that I would recieve those funds back soon because those payments were still processing.
On an unrelated note, this individual got into my steam account, changed the password and associated email, so I lost that too, I had over 250 games on it :(
Further information, the $5,000 was two years of saving money. I bank with Bank of America. I am a student at university. My dad is helping me a lot in this situation, he has been giving me money for food and other supplies since both my accounts are frozen. Also a few weeks prior, I downloaded a program that had something called a keygen. My firewall warned me about the software and I ignored it, I am 98% sure this is the cause of my problems. Lastly i kept changing my email password and steam passwords but the individual kept managing to send more emails for purchases and change my steam password
So I am not sure if I will get my savings back but until then, I am closing several accounts, making a new email and opening a new bank account. I also am NOT doing this on the affected computer because I am certain it was that computer that caused all this.
Thank you for reading my story and for any advice you can give.
TL;DR Had a keygen on my computer, lost my entire savings, my email was compromised and someone attempted to purchase several giftcards with the money in my checkings.
Edit: thank you for all the advice everyone. I'm expecting to get a call back from the bank about the money in my savings account. And I filed a police report. Wish me luck
Submitted February 06, 2019 at 05:46PM by rkader5 http://bit.ly/2Sz6F7M
