After 14 years of using Twitter and now X and gaining over 50,000 followers and sharing 1,000’s of posts, one morning we tried to log in to our account and found it that it had been stolen from us. We’d just had an office meeting and were considering using X Ads by coincidence!
Fear not we thought, we were the genuine owners of our @marketme account and can show proof of ownership so we will be able to get in back… so we thought.
Let’s delve into this story in hope that someone from X can help us and restore our faith: Firstly, our account was associated with an email address and domain that we recently lost so initially, holding our hands up, we can be at fault for accidently not updating our X account of @marketme with new sign in details. We openly admit this was an unfortunate mistake, but:
From this time of losing our email log in we see that another account obviously was able to access our account (how this occurred we do not know) and take our precious account name and community… We feel like it is 14 years of hard work down the drain! This person / bot / entity (who knows) then changed the account username to one of their own @o__xoo0 and use our old account as a ‘parody account’ and they have kept all our previous posts on their timeline which of course is copyright theft as far as we are concerned or at least, impersonation?
Parody Account who stole @Marketme
So again, we thought that this would be an easy fix for X in that us, a long term user of their service (14 years), who can provide full details of log-ins / email / password / company ownership and also live evidence that the account did belong to us is calling upon themselves to help.
In order to reach X we had to go through a detailed online form submission which included sharing formal identity and taking a face photo. Again, this shows we are making a genuine claim and you can connect our name to this stolen account? But again, no… It seems that X would prefer to have a parody account user over the genuine user who’s purpose was sharing local small business posts to support people across the UK (again, these posts are clearly evident on the now stolen account):
reposts my @Marketme of which 100’s are in our existing timeline
Just so readers are aware, as soon as we saw that @marketme had been taken from us we quickly searched for @Marketme on X and saw that it didn’t exist – We immediately had to create a new account on X and secure that name so you will see that @Marketme now has hardly any followers and just as importantly, hardly any posts.
So, what was the reply from X?
X reply to @Marketme
Very poor in our opinion and totally not understanding. With all the evidence in front of them and much more that we can give and also stand by, even if it went to any kind of court, we are penalised by X preferring to support a parody account who has hi-jacked ours over the genuine previous owners who used X and previously Twitter in what is was ultimately designed for. We know that X would be able to check the history of our account and see exactly what had happened and upon making the correct decision, simply install our original username with it’s original account history (followers / posts / messages) – Many years ago Twitter helped us change our account name and did exactly this when we acquired @marketme that had become available.
We were the owners of @Marketme
The followers that were hi-jacked were ours
Our posts are still on this hi-jacked account
We can provide all log in details upon request to X
We can prove ownership of the domain / email address used at that time for log in
We have not been told if X communicated with us to say our account was being closed and being given out to a third party (surely it should be closed down and all data removed if that was the case?) Our our private messages also on show to this hi-jacker?
We have never had our account flagged / suspended / terminated or carried out any bad practises that would put us in this position
Can someone from X please help? If you read this post and have any advice, then we would really appreciate hearing from you – Please contact Marketme founder and owner Christopher Walkey via [email protected] / 0044 (0)7917 434943