Recently a friend of mine had her Skype account hacked. Scammers decided to use this opportunity to trick people from her contact list out of their money, and in just one hour they received more than 100,000 rubles (about $1,500)!

When everything came to light, it was very difficult to do almost anything to fix this problem.

A few days were spent communicating with the Skype support service: employees needed more than 24 hours to understand what had happened. When they figured out that Katya's account had been hacked, they sent her a link to a password recovery form, totally ignoring the part of the letter in which Katya explained that scammers had changed the associated e-mail as well.

In the mean time Support service refused to block Katya's account until they were able to clarify the situation through-and-through.

In the end, Katya correctly answered all questions from verification form except one: when was your Skype account created. The support service decided that the whole situation was too complicated and recommended that she create another account! By that time, the fraudsters had already stolen about $5,000.

To avoid this problem and keep your experience secure, here are a few tips:

* The best, most obvious and at the same time the most ignored tip is to use a reliable password! Everybody knows it but there are still a lot of thoughtless people.

* Don't use the same password for different accounts. If you do, when one of web-services is compromised you can lose all your accounts.

* Use two-factor authentication to protect your accounts. In this case you'll receive a short code via SMS or e-mail to use as a second password.

* Don't click suspicious links: there are a lot of pages on the web that steal your data. It's called phishing. Also, do not reply to letters and messages from unknown contacts.

The author of this post is a very popular Russian blogger. This story recently involved one of his friends. The victim was Katya Turtseva, a high-ranking employee of an international IT company.