My Experience With Steem Account Recovery

It all started on Sunday, after I had dived deep in on Saturday night till 3:00 GMT on one of my favorite show VGMA (Vodafone Ghana Music Awards). To those who wonder what VGMA is, it’s a music award show we normally have once in a year here (Ghana). A show similar to Grammy’s Awards and BET Awards, so you should know that it is a show I will never miss for anything.

I remember making noise all over my home on discord, City of Neoxian that Saturday evening, that @xawi was like I needed a sleep and I was like no early sleep for me today because I didn’t want to miss a single second of the Music Awards (from the red carpet to the very last of the main event). The show was fun though and I remember switching off my mobile data and laying down at exactly 3:18 GMT.

After about 7hours of sleep, I woke and quickly start drafting my post to be published that Sunday. And after drafting my post I moved to esteem mobile to post it. I remember clicking the post button on my esteem mobile and I had an error message that I had to give the dapp the permission by providing my posting key (even though I never logged out of my esteem mobile app). At first, I thought of it as a bug and restarted my phone, I did the posting process again and was still having the same issue, so I quickly went to partiko and noticed my liquid steem and sbd were no more.
I then jumped onto chrome and tried logging in on steemit.com and kept having wrong password notifications even though I knew the passwords (master and posting keys) were the right one. I quickly tried to check my status with the wallet session of steemit.com and I nearly had a jolt.

At this point, I know you are wondering what could give me that jolt. At the go I just saw @ferrate started powering down 1500+sp (all sp I had), @ferrate transferred 23.300 Steem to blocktrades, and @ferrate transferred 24.000 sbd to blocktrades. I then went like am I dreaming or something.

Quickly, I jumped onto discord and straight away went into my very first home on City of Neoxian to tell what was happening to my account. When I finished all I had to say, I was told my account has been hacked and that someone has changed all the keys to my account, so I need to start an account recovery process on steemit.com as soon as possible. I went back to steemit.com and started the recovery process, and started to bell out the hack to some lovely friends on the platform to get a way forward on how I could get my account back safely as soon as possible.

I remember meeting @daan on oracle-d discord server and I was like hey Daan, just come around so I could use your knowledge on an issue. Within seconds, he was right on to me and we chatted ourselves out with most of my Pro mates. They gave me the idea of contacting blocktrades, which I did and got my account blacklisted till I recover it back.

I went to chibera discord server and saw my lovely buddy, who we use to fun around and never let go of his potato soups @ecoinstant, I told him what has happened to my account and he gave me a great surprise by letting me meet some great witnesses on the steem blockchain. He sent me the server of steemcleaners and before I could even get to them, he had already reported my issue already. So all I had to do was to meet @guiltyparties(Witness) and @pjau who really helped me a lot.

Low and behold, after72 hours of waiting, I finally had the amazing news of my life form steemit.com saying Your account recovery request has been approved. I really jumped from the crouch and almost wanted to break my legs with some fun. I quickly went straight to my laptop, connected with a hotspot to begin the final phase of my account recovery process.

Fortunately or Unfortunately for me, I clicked the link to my account recovery and had a message saying, the page you are trying to access does not exist. I thought my chrome wasn’t in its best mode so I tried opera mini then I got the same message, I quickly went on to Mozilla firefox and still had the same error.

At once, all the joy I had went back to sadness, I became more and more worried, went to steemcleaners server, met @pjau who told me to change the domain name of the recovery link form steemit.com to steemitwallet.com and try again if it works. I did as he said, then I was just starring at my name and my new generated password to my account. I was filled with joy once again and went to celebrate the good news with all the my family (City of Neoxian), and friends on discord. Such a great fun it was after the recovery.

Once again, I say a big thank you to @neoxian and the entire active users (@donefezy, @ifeoluwa88, @xawi, @burlarj, @bala41288, @aamirijaz, @olaexcel, @akomoajong, @rehan12, @momogrow, @udezee, @thereikiforest, @zaku) in the City of Neoxian discord server, @daan and all my pro mates in Oracle-d server, @ecoinstant (who never go with his potato soups), @kyle of blocktrades, @guiltyparties(Witness) and @pjau of steemcleaners and the entire team at Steem Inc. words can never express all that you all went through for me.

I would plead with @ned and his entire team, to please effect the change in the domain name (from steemit.com to steemitwallet.com) for account recovery links, for novices like me on the blockchain not to lose hope in recovering their accounts.

Lastly, even ever use your master password to login any dapp, your private and active keys are always there for all you need to do on the platform. This will help you to only change your various keys when one gets access to them.

---

All images used are screenshots from steemit.com and my email.