Hacked and hacked off - why is there no assistance!?

Question

My account has been hacked. They have changed my password, primary contact address, the currency and my ID name!All there are two pieces of advice I am getting from Skype:1 - Fill in the on-line form so they can verify who I am.  There are 16 questions in the form! One of which is which month and year did you start your account.  WHO KNOWS THAT? If you call a bank a raise a security issue they cancel your card.  Why won't SKYPE freeze my account until this has been resolved? The hackers have stolen my identity and can pass themselves off as me and commit more fraud by contacting my contacts.  They can solicit all sorts of information from them, pretending to be me. I cannot successfully fill in all the answers to the form and that is it, no other option.  Skype (ironically) cannot call me to discuss the issue! There is no on-line chat facility.  The only help I have is the constant loop of fill in the impossible form!! I was originally told to fill the in the form as many times as I needed to, until I get the answers right.  I have since been told that if I make more than 2 incorrect submissions my account is irrevocably irretrievable.2- The second advise is to open a new account and forget about the other account!  But this is FRAUD! They have access to my personal data AND they have stolen my identity.I am shocked that there is not an immediate response to my issue and that I have had to beg for some help and still I have none.If someone comes on here and tells me to fill in the form with data from over 10 years ago, don't.

Answer 1

There is a sociological/philosophical issue here. As, when virtual monopoly corps reach a scale where they near ubiquitousness; being cut off by them due to their own issues, can be a serious detriment to one's life through no fault of one's own. In many parts of the world, access to the web is a human right. Cutting innocent people off permanently due to a combination of policy error and 3rd party criminal activity does seem outrageous. At what point will it be a human right that corporations of a certain scale, are required to make an attempt to redress genuine issues such as that raised in this thread? Also, an inability to 'clear one's name' implicitly denies any measure of justice. Likewise, surely a lingering 'association' with criminal activity (conducted on one's account), could not just cause a user potentially serious problems, but could make security services (inc Skype's own) job much harder by creating a far bigger pool of (often innocent) 'suspects' in which criminals can better hide. Much harder to find the needle in a needlessly inflated haystack. Then there is the issue of undoing the damage. If criminals make money by jacking accounts, if you cannot access those accounts to rectify any issue, surely the criminals keep can keep more of the money made (or saved by using our accounts to comminicate/conduct scams at almost no cost to them). That in itself, if something could be done but is not, could be considered close to assisting crims at the expense of customers, sec servs, and indeed Skype itself when good customers are injured by situations like this and forced against their will to other services - if consumers are fortunate enough to have an alternative service available at all. Otherwise, they are just left disadvantaged. To end on a constructive point. Skype, please help us out here. And lose the question about date account opened. Almost no-one after a decade will be able to anwer that, even to the right year without just guessing. And a year would be so vague as to be useless as a sec Q anyway. Seems that hackers would be more likely to be able to correctly answer that Q than a long-term customer.