“At that point, THEY messaged my friends and family saying, ‘Hey, I’ve locked myself out of my Facebook account. I need you to help me out by confirming my identity. Click on the following link and tell me the code they send you.’ I had to call and warn everyone not to click on the link because it could open them up to being hacked, too.

“THEY were able to get into my phone system and began texting and phoning my customers trying to get them to send THEM money. My older customers who were not very tech-savvy were the most vulnerable. I lost a lot of customers because of that.

“When THEY hacked my Facebook business page, THEY changed my salon phone number to THEIR phone number. When new customers would message an inquiry, THEY would tell them that they had to put down a deposit to get an appointment. Someone inquired about boarding and THEY had her send a $200 deposit, and later, others told me they called me and I never returned the call. This all really hurt my business.

“All this time THEY were also going through my Yahoo account, and I got locked out of it. Since COVID, everyone sends all their information through email, so THEY were able to get a lot of private information from mine. I had just sent emails with my driver’s license number and my social security number and other information when filling out forms for my new daughter. THEY had all my passwords and everything when THEY hacked into my Yahoo account. THEY were able to log into my square account and were actually working on taking loans out.

“I had to call and shut everything down—my credit cards and banking accounts. I was unable to pay my employees for a week. I had to contact Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian and put freezes on all my credit.

“The only account that was not hacked into was my Groomsoft account. I called Groomsoft and talked to a real person. They were great! I told them what happened and they helped me. They changed my email and secured it down. They changed all my passwords and fixed it so I was able to send a mass message to all my customers telling them what happened.

“Facebook was no help at all. There’s nobody at Facebook to contact. My account and business page were reported many, many times and the account is still up. I tried for months to get the account back. I had 16 years of pictures on my Facebook page that I’ll never get back. I don’t have any of my wedding pictures. When we got married, there was no money for a professional photographer, so we just got pictures that our friends and family took and I uploaded them into an album on my Facebook page.

“I called our local police department and had to file reports. I was told there wasn’t much they could do since most of this kind of crime is being committed by people who are overseas. THEY are using our internet and our phone systems to hack us, but since THEY are not in the United States, it is very difficult to locate and prosecute them. These people just sit behind a computer in another country and have no fear of repercussions.

“I had to have a police record of having my identity stolen, which I had to send to the Internal Revenue Service in case the hackers try to use my social security number in the future to file and get my tax refund. I was unable to change my social security or driver’s license numbers. I was told they would only change them in the most extenuating circumstances, and, apparently, having your entire identity stolen did not qualify.

“It was the saddest time in my life, because I was helpless. Nobody could do anything to fix it or help me. It’s such a violation of privacy. It happened two years ago and I still cry over it. To this day I have panic attacks. My daughter was six days old when I went back to work. I didn’t get a maternity leave at all because of this situation.

“Now I have super-encrypted passwords that I have to write down because I don’t trust saving them to my Google account or my phone. I’m still worried about it happening again. Because THEY have my social security and driver’s license numbers, I have to watch all of my accounts like a hawk.

“It took months and months of phone calls and messages to try to restore my accounts and try to mitigate the damages. My business suffered because of being hacked and also because I had to reschedule dogs to deal with all of this. I still don’t know how THEY got into my Yahoo account, but that opened the door for them to do everything else,” Mindy concludes.

Mindy’s story is a real wake-up call for all groomers. Identity theft is real and can happen to anyone. She urges you to take every precaution possible to keep yourself and your identity safe—because THEY may be out to `get YOU!