Today was a most unusual and disheartening day. I woke up for work at 6 am and found my gmail account locked. I was able to see a few messages, but they were “grayed out” so I couldn’t open them. I noticed one subscriber to Personal Branding Magazine in the listing, so I viewed my PayPal account to see if the transaction went through. Of course, my account was locked on this site as well. I quickly called PayPal and received a message that someone had jacked over $600 from the account that was supposed to be donated to The American Cancer Society and had closed the account. All of the current subscribers got an email that I shut down their subscription, which of course I didn’t. As a token of my brand, I sent the entire subscription base an apology email.
As you can probably tell already, I’m not in the greatest of moods, especially because my gmail account is directly linked to my google group account, where I store members of my network who contribute to the magazine. I tried calling google and pleading to reactivate my account, but they only handle service calls online. I even went so far as to call the adwords representatives to ask them what I should do.
This whole series of events has actually made me lose opportunities and contact with members in my network. If you would like to help out, please register for the Personal Branding Network group. This group is set to have multiple owners, so that in the even this were to happen again, the group would be preserved.
As for me, I will have a new email address at dan.schawbel@gmail.com if you would like to reconnect. It will take about a week to recover all damages I hope. Issue 2 of the magazine will be delivered as scheduled. I appreciate your support at this time.
