I'm Off Twitter (Because I Was Hacked)

They got my ass! Read about it for free.

Yesterday, I was hacked. Because Twitter probably fired everyone in customer support, I don’t see myself ever regaining my account. Thus, I am off Twitter. Many such cases! I probably should have done this a while ago, but anyway, if the daily CHH articles aren’t enough, feel free to follow me to BlueSky.

this is me rn

I never thought I’d be hacked because I’ve gotten approximately three million phishing scam emails in my thirty-five years of life, and have never once fallen for the scam. I almost fell for a banking scam over the phone a few years ago up until the point that they told me I needed to send a $2700 Zelle payment “to myself.” (Joke’s on them, I don’t know how to use Zelle and I would have given up at that point regardless of my suspicions.)

In this case, the scam was that I received an email telling me that I had violated copyright laws and needed to file an appeal or I would face Twitter account suspension. This isn’t the first time this has happened—every now and then you will use an innocuous photo from Google Images and discover that whoever owns it is particularly litigious (for example, when selling on eBay, you can probably use a retail image of the item 99% of the time, but 1% of the time, you’ll get threatened with account suspension for using a copyrighted image.)

Anyway, the image that I was purportedly in trouble for using was this one of Jeff Bezos’ wife at the inauguration. I used it and described her as “serving cunt in a House of CB ASOS business casual clubwear way.”

Anyway, I know this sounds absurd on the face of it, especially given the obvious grammar and spelling mistakes in the email:

Despite the fact that this image was plastered all over X as well as many other sites, I figured that X was being particularly obnoxious about “copyright infringement” because I, as a liberal, had made fun of something related to the inauguration. I’ve seen other leftists and liberals suspended or banned on Twitter for fairly ridiculous things, so I naturally assumed this was some degree of political bias at play. (Me, a moron: yes, website that hates me and people like me, please let me back in!!!)

The funny thing is, I actually thought this email sounded suspicious so I googled “X legal team copyright scam” and nothing came up despite the fact that this exact scam has taken down other “big accounts” over the past few weeks. Anyway, like some kind of ignoramus, I clicked “review details” which prompted me to log into X. Then, it started asking me to fill out the appeal, which required my government-issued ID and other much more personal information. At that point, I still didn’t realize it was a scam, but I was simply too lazy to do all that shit and thought, “Fuck that, I’ll take the suspension, I don’t want to go upstairs to get my passport.”

Immediately, the scammers got control of my account and changed the password, then turned off two-factor authentication (which clearly wasn’t going to help me if it can be immediately turned off by a scammer.) I was able to change my password without logging in, but that was also no help, because the scammer used a feature I didn’t even know existed, wherein they made someone a “delegate.” This meant that this individual could post on behalf of my account, and surprise surprise—changing your password doesn’t lock the delegate out. Also, every time I tried to log back in with the new password, it prompted me to use an authenticator app that I had never downloaded, or to “contact support” which just asked me to do the same thing.

This also meant that I still technically “had control of my account,” which was what the automatically-generated support email from X told me when I reported the hacker. For some reason, I assumed this email came from a real person (in fact, I was surprised at how quickly they responded!) and repeatedly refreshed my email, hoping they would report that they had reset my account and booted the delegate (or delegates) out. But of course, they didn’t, because they weren’t a real person. I proceeded to contact them five times, with variations of “pls respond.”

I also considered creating a new account, DMing the scammer, basically saying, “Dude, I want in on whatever scam you’re running on that cartoons account” and then deactivating the entire account in a kamikaze-style mission. I did not do this, but it would have been funny.

At this point, I was anxiously awaiting the first tweets of my imposters. For some reason, I imagined that their first course of action would be to tweet a bunch of slurs, then cook up the most offensive Israel-Palestine opinion imaginable, figuring they were doing this for the singular purpose of getting me canceled. Instead, they did something that made me look much worse—retweeted a month-old photo of myself.

This was deeply embarrassing. Everyone who follows me knows that I’m not going around shouting the N-word, but retweeting a flattering photo for attention and for the purpose of promoting my fitness guide (there I go again) is exactly the kind of thing I would do, only slightly more cringe. At this point, I had announced I was hacked on Bluesky, but I don’t think most of my Twitter followers had seen it.

I realized I would need to use some kind of Twitter alt to raise awareness of my hacking, but at the time, the only one I could remember using was DylanRockz2002, a parody account of a fictional British teenage boy, inspired by a Reddit troll I did for three years, which I wrote about here.

This was what Dylan had to say on the OG January 6:

Anyway, I was like, yeah, I can’t DM engineers at Twitter using the Dylan account. But then I remembered a slightly less embarrassing alt, which was somehow also British satire, but much more presentable: Daily Crumpet, a parody tabloid I cooked up five years ago.

Anyway, I used this account to reach out to my followers to let them know I was hacked. But as it turns out, the hackers had something else in mind. Copying my art style (presumably with some kind of AI tool) they posted a crypto scam based around none other than a vaguely reptilian Trump:

My followers immediately sussed this out as fake for a few reasons. First of all, I don’t like Trump, even if I am an illustrious Trump impersonator. Second, as one person pointed out, “there’s no fucking way CHH knows what a token is.”

The post was immediately community noted. I’ll give credit where it’s due: Twitter’s community notes feature is actually decent, probably because it relies on Twitter users doing work for free, and not people, you know, having jobs. But I digress. From what I can see, it doesn’t look like many people are falling for the scam.

So what’s next for me? Well, in an ideal world, I could get rid of the delegates and regain access to my account, which is clearly only going to happen if someone high up at Twitter takes pity on me. But if that doesn’t happen in the next few days, my plan is to completely nuke my Twitter account, if that’s even possible, perhaps by brigading it with reports from all my reply guys. I know that sounds extreme, but I should have left Twitter long ago. I didn’t, mostly because I enjoy it for the purpose of gathering Many Such Takes, and selfishly, I still have a pretty big audience on there. I briefly considered moving over to BlueSky permanently, but as I noted before, it just didn’t seem to have the juice that Twitter has, and I was a bit nervous to put all my eggs in the basket that fashioned itself “anti-nazi” when the nazi in question was Ben Dreyfuss.

The biggest shocker that came out of all this (other than the horrific revelation that I am dumb enough to fall for a phishing scam) is the fact that Twitter just…doesn’t have anyone working there outside of engineering. I’ve experienced terrible customer service before—after all, I rode Spirit Airlines just a few weeks go. But nothing quite compares to emailing an endless chain of robots with zero humans at the end of the tunnel. Usually, there’s something you can do in these situations, even if it’s a bit cumbersome, like being on the phone with customer service for two hours and repeatedly Karening out, asking to speak to the manager, who turns out to sound suspiciously like the original person doing a slightly more serious voice. I never thought I’d be begging for an experience like that, but Twitter has driven me to that point.

I should have seen the writing on the wall when they inexplicably removed me from the monetization program after I paid for Premium, a year ago. Of course, this was less of a big deal, and I wasn’t making much money on there anyway, so I dropped it after exchanging some unproductive DMs with the Premium support account. I didn’t consider the implications of the fact that even after paying for a subscription, there would be zero real humans available for customer support—seems uhhh, bad! For some reason, I thought that Twitter’s complete lack of support infrastructure wouldn’t be a problem for me, because nobody would have any reason to want to hack my account, and even if they did, I would be smart enough to avoid it because I had avoided so many phishing scams in the past. As it turns out, I was not smart enough!

So, as funny as this is, I do feel fairly violated, but most of all, I just feel extremely frustrated at the fact that Twitter allowed any of this to happen. Yes, it was completely my fault for clicking the stupid link! But in situations like these, on quite literally any other website or app, there’s a real human you can email who might help you, even if it takes a little while. Twitter has no such human.

And assuming nothing changes in the next day or two, I will be off Twitter, although I could see using the Crumpet Daily account specifically for finding funny takes, I don’t know. I’m not sure what my future on Twitter will look like, because my account might remain up, posting crypto scams, but I don’t think that’ll be very successful. And while it’s tempting to blame Twitter, or even blame myself for clicking the link, I actually blame myself the most but for something entirely different, which was the fact that I saw so many indications that Twitter had zero support infrastructure and just didn’t care, because I enjoyed the dopamine hit of getting attention, and I thought it was too helpful for my Substack not to use it.

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far, you might wonder what’s going to happen to Many Such Takes. It will still exist in some form, but give me a few weeks to figure that out. For now, I will try to write at least one free article per week to account for that, and perhaps Many Such Takes will take a form that exists across social media—there’s plenty of weirdness on Meta that I haven’t even touched. But in any case, whether this is the first CHH post you’ve read or if you’re a dedicated subscriber, thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy what’s to come!

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