Hassles of Everyday Life

If you do a Google search for my cell phone number you will get a few results -- creepy web sites in countries like Turkey, Russia, etc. which compile various phone numbers. If you try and go to these web pages you will get stern warnings from your browser, "don't do this," because they are extremely unsafe.

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Because I have an Android cell phone, the other day I got some message from Google maps which told me all these places I have been recently over a period of several days. For example, the museum in the town where I grew up near Vancouver (I donated a bunch of stuff to them), two Value Village stores, and a restaurant where I had brunch with this old friend of mine. Because I have "location" on with the phone, it knew all these things. If I don't have location on and I lose my phone, it cannot find it.

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I got warnings in both text message and email yesterday that I hadn't paid one of my credit card bills and the amount is due on March 30, hardly enough time to pay it off, because banks don't seem to work on the weekends as far as receiving payments are concerned. The only problem is, I already paid the bill when I got the statement 10 days before and in my account at the bank which issued the card it shows that the payment was received shortly after this.

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Yesterday I got a text from some person in Ohio which looked like it was a wrong number. I said to them, who are you, the person then started to get chatty when I said I was in Vancouver, saying "Oh Canada is a wonderful country, blah blah blah." They sort of apologized for bothering me, but then seemed to be starting a conversation with "what should I call you?" At this point, I blocked the number. I felt like saying, "Oh, I guess you are one of those Internet prostitutes," but they did seem sincere, obviously part of their persona to insinuate their way into my good books. I should have replied, "I am Officer Mike with the Vancouver City Police."

Another example of why Facebook is dumb

On January 17th, 2023, I posted the following on Facebook. It said "Shared with Public," this means "anyone on or off Facebook" can see this posting. Probably not a good idea considering what happened. I only have about 5 dozen friends on FB, these people that I have known in the past, have worked with, etc. I thought only these people would see my posting, which was like this:

"I received e-mail from one of my investment companies that my statement is ready. I don't recall ever receiving something from these people before (this was not a scam). I tried to track down the password, but there was nothing. So I tried the usual "forgot your password" link. When I did this, it says what is your e-mail address, so I entered the address that this document was sent to. Just below this, it asks for your "login name." Now, if I can't remember the password or where it is, why would I know where my "user name" is? DUH!!"

I actually resolved this problem myself. But shortly after posting this, I received a message from some attractive looking woman in SYRIA (seriously, no pun intended for "syria-sly") with advice on contacting a guy called bunyan_assist on Instagram. (Facebook owns Instagram.)

The bunyan_assist person supposedly can help people if you are having trouble connecting to accounts because of login/password issues. But I wondered, how is this relevant to me, because I didn't provide a lot of details about the problem I was having including specific information about the web site I was having the problem with.

In addition to this Instagram account name, a phone number which was in Wisconsin was provided. This Syrian woman had several hundred friends, making me think that her account was hacked. The whole thing was creepy, I just deleted her message.

However, I wanted to post about this experience later. It took a while to find a reference to this bunyan_assist in my Google search history from a couple of weeks prior. When you do the subsequent Google search for this "fixer," the resulting information which you can see on the search results page is very sketchy:

(#1) More I messaged @BUNYAN_ASSIST on Instagram, his a cyber security expert who helped me recovered my account successfully, kindly message or text him on +1...

(#2) But I know you can still get back into your account by direct message (Bunyan_assist) on Instagram now and ask for his help to recover your account text or..

(This what you see when you get the search results, if you go to the place where these results are supposedly located, the above information is not seen.)

So I posted about my experience on FB with much of the same info as above (again, not just to my friends), and almost immediately got multiple responses similar to what I had received before. This was all very weird. Is some scammer scraping every account on Facebook with keywords like "password," "login," "problem(s)," etc.? The whole thing was creepy, I just deleted all of it (again). These are the second batch of responses I got over this issue...

5 comments

Kelly Andrews -- Kindly inbox me immediately for assistance

Brenda Tullock -- I forgot my Facebook password too but got help from meta_generat_cyber on instagram he helped recover my account he can recover your account...

Brenda Tullock -- Just try and message him on Instagram now I'm sure he can help

Evelyn Smith -- You just invoked more of them lol (this woman wanted to become my friend on FB, I declined her request)

Mhiz Golden -- You can get your account back contact mirac Recovery on Instagram