Someone Else Was Me

Thank you to all the humans who gave me the courage to write this article.

Everyone online shows you the highlight reel. All the good and none of the bad. And I think people are tired of that, so I'm telling you the truth.

Remember how I said in my last post that PR is really dangerous? Well, here's how I found that out.

When I say PR or media, that includes social media. Social media is really an extension of the legacy media, and both are components of public relations. As part of that, your social media profiles are very important. I know mine was.

I'm not a huge fan of talking about the past. But after my Instagram was hacked, I basically deleted myself from the internet, and it's been extremely challenging to build traction online since. That's why I decided to do this four-part series. I need to set the record straight, so that when I meet people, they have a little bit of context about my background.

Who I was before

Before this happened, a lot of people liked me. I was constantly out and about, volunteering at different places and helping different organizations. Every week I was at church cooking food for the less fortunate. I always tried to help people with more than just money, to just be there for people in their lives, whatever it was. You can ask the people who know me. They'll tell you that if you need help, I'm the first person to show up. That's the kind of person I am. That's just how I was raised.

What happened

So, long story short.

My Instagram account got hacked. The hackers took over my identity and then messaged all the people I was connected with on Instagram, offering them a Bitcoin investment scam. And I guess because people trusted me, they sent these people a lot of money.

To be quite honest, it was a pretty stupid scam. It was basically: give me a dollar, and in 30 days I'll give you $1,000. And they got away with it.

I never would have imagined this was possible. I wouldn't have imagined that someone would send me, say, $20,000 over an Instagram message without getting on a phone call, or even texting me. Nonetheless, people fell for it, and in a very, very, very short period of time, basically overnight, my entire life was overturned.

Basically overnight

No customer information was compromised. But not only am I waking up to a bunch of people hating me because they think I scammed them, I also have no access to money, because my bank account was frozen.

To make matters worse, I couldn't even receive more money from my business. Since my bank account was frozen, my credit card processor couldn't charge me their fees, so they stopped processing my payments. Now I'm left without a bank account and without any way to make more money. I'm basically screwed. And it all happened in less than a few days.

I had bills to pay. Software bills, rent, employees, contractors. And they all thought I was joking, like I was making this up, as if I just didn't want to pay them, which wasn't true. That added to my frustration a lot. Honestly, I didn't know what to do.

Trying to make it right

I tried to do everything I could think of to limit the damage. I posted on my other social profiles that my page had been hacked. When a girl here who got hit by the scam told me, I immediately rode my electric bike over to her apartment and helped her file a police report and call her bank. I filed reports with the Pittsburgh police, the FBI's internet crimes division, the Better Business Bureau, the California Attorney General's Office, and the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office. I even sent a letter and a tweet to our state house representatives and senators. None of it worked.

I tried contacting Instagram. I talked to my attorney. He said that half the time, Instagram doesn't even respond to them. And I didn't have any money to pay my attorney anyway, because remember, everything was frozen.

To try to make things right, I sold everything I owned so I could at least pay my employees and contractors. I traded a photographer a computer for work, and he never finished it. Looking back, selling everything looks even worse, because it makes it seem like you're in a really bad spot. Which I was, just not for the reason people thought. Remember, revenue for this business was growing 10 to 20 percent month over month, and we had just launched a new high-ticket offer where we could offer financing on $5,000 to $30,000 packages to anyone who asked. I paid my employees, and that was it. I couldn't pay them anymore, I couldn't take payments, and I couldn't run my business. My credit was ruined. Verizon randomly canceled my cell phone, so no one could even reach me.

Some people even thought I was such an evil genius that I reported myself to the authorities on purpose. That makes no sense to me. If I'm such an evil genius, why would I use my own identity to run a Bitcoin investment scam? I would never do this.

What I learned about human nature

To be quite frank with you, this was probably the greatest lesson I ever learned in life, because it taught me so much about human nature that I never thought I would see.

Here's how it works. Somebody gets a message from you on Instagram. People are so busy, they don't really think about it. Then, instead of telling you anything, they go to all their friends and say they got this scammy message from you, or that you scammed them. Before you know it, you're out in society and all these people think badly of you because of something you didn't even know happened. They never tell you about it. They just tell their friends and family. That's the craziest part of it.

Guilty until proven innocent

And it kept going. Instagram never responded to me, and they let these people keep going. They did not care that someone stole the account and was scamming people. They just kept rolling with it. I lost a lot of faith in people, and I lost my confidence for a while. Even though I still had a little business, I was in a bad place. This went on for a long time.

After about a year of this, I was so frustrated. I remember one night I was volunteering at a church function, helping cook in the kitchen. By that point, even people in the personal side of my life were starting to buy into this. They thought I did it. I wasn't myself. I wasn't thinking right. I was very anxious. And I guess some people saw that as proof that I was the bad guy. Turns out in America, I guess you're guilty until proven innocent. Would never have guessed that.

One Sunday, I was just sick of it. I remembered a guy I used to know who worked for one of the three-letter agencies, and I still had his number in my phone. So I called him up, and he answered. I said, "Look, dude, you're a special agent. These people have my Instagram account. They've ruined my identity. Not only have they completely ruined my life, they're still harming people. They're still running this scam. Is there anything you can do? You're the government. Can you stop these people?"

He said, "Dude, half the time, if we contact Instagram, they don't even respond to us and we're the government."

You have got to be kidding me. You absolutely have got to be kidding me.

In hindsight, I should have driven to California and knocked on Instagram's door, or hung out on the street until I found an employee who would help me.

That was my low point. My personal and professional reputation was ruined. It felt like everywhere I went, people hated me. My family thought I was this terrible person, which I'm not. Even one of my best friends, someone I'd known since I was a kid, kept spreading this lie. It really hurt my feelings. I saw the true nature of humanity when this happened, and I feel bad for anybody who goes through something like this.

Adding insult to injury

During that time, other things happened that added insult to injury.

Online

There was a very well-known roofer in the Pittsburgh area I grew up in who would constantly message me on Facebook, harassing me and spreading this story. Anytime I tried to stand up for myself, tell the truth, right the wrongs, or defend myself and my family, people like this would just come out of the weeds. These are people who show up on the internet acting like they're the greatest people ever. They volunteer, they donate, they're active in their church. These are the types of people who were doing this to me. I could not believe that someone of that business standing would do this to me.

Some people went on the internet and left bad reviews of my business, people who weren't even my clients, saying my business scammed them. It wasn't even my business. It was my personal Instagram. It had nothing to do with my business. I told the review sites, hey, this is wrong, here's all the evidence. They did nothing. More fake Instagram and Facebook accounts were created to slander and defame me.

In public

There was another entrepreneur in the area, and every time I went out in public and ran into his assistant, she would tell me how I scammed all of her clients and how all these people hated me. Every time, I told her, I don't know how to scam anybody. My identity got stolen. I can show you all the paperwork. Do you want me to send it to you? They just didn't care.

I ran into a friend at an old bar and met his friend, who hated me for no reason. Turns out he'd been scammed, and I never knew.

A close friend of mine who's in construction ran into somebody at Home Depot, and that person did the same thing: spread these lies that I was scamming people on Instagram, which I wasn't.

An employee

Then there was an employee. He went on vacation for a week without telling me he was going. He said he worked while he was on vacation, but he had time tracking software on his computer, and I could see that he didn't. So I didn't pay him for that week. This guy reported me to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor for unpaid wages. On top of that, he stole a laptop and a computer monitor from me, a couple thousand dollars' worth of stuff. It's not that much money, but it's the principle: somebody would steal from me and then file a report against me. So I had to go through this long process, providing them all these documents, all this BS, and eventually they told me I didn't do anything wrong. I said, I know I didn't do anything wrong, because I was telling the truth.

The part that hurt most

After everything I did for people my whole life, not one person apologized for how they treated me, slandered me, or dragged my name through the mud.

Becoming a ghost

After all of this, I was afraid to use the internet. I don't know if you've ever tried to make a living for yourself or run a business or market a business, especially a new one, but it's very difficult to do without the internet. It's nearly impossible. I tried that for four or five years. I tried to be a ghost. I tried to remove everything about me from the internet. And I just wasn't able to make any progress.

Starting over

I had a little saved up and a small amount of residual income, so I could reset for a year while I worked through all of this. I tried to restart the business, but I couldn't get my confidence and positive attitude back. So I went exploring to figure out what I actually wanted next: podcasting, nonprofit work, volunteer work, the venture capital, private equity, family office, and investment banking world, artificial intelligence, intelligence services, and faith and theology.

I was left searching for answers for a long time. It took me a long while to process how cruel people were to me during this time, and the truth about human nature.

Why I'm sharing this

That's what happened to me. That's where I've been, and that's why I've been off the internet. But I realize that if I'm going to get on with my life and career, I've got to fix that. This series is me doing that.

Hopefully this gives you some insight. If you know anybody who's gone through a similar experience, or you have yourself, hopefully you can understand them better now, and maybe have a little more empathy. And just realize that gossip, slander, and lying about people are very harmful. Extremely harmful. I wouldn't wish it on anybody, not even my enemy.

I hope you have a great day, a great year, and a great life. I'm glad I'm done writing about the past now.

I'm going to figure out my next thing now. Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

Never Perfect Dan

PS. Thank you to all the humans who gave me the courage to write this article.