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by ksaj 912 days ago
This sounds very familiar to me.

A couple years ago I helped someone in a situation incredibly similar to this. I'm in infosec, and have forensics in my background.

He used to "talk" to the hackers by writing text the phone's notepad, but when I saw this, I only saw his side of the apparent conversations. He said also that they usually only converse by writing a couple random letters and then deleting them... so apparently kb meant "keyboard," for example. These apparent hackers were totally on him, having infected all the systems in his home, and continually appearing on even brand new phones he purchased to lose the trail.

The person sent me their devices, and I found zero evidence. Then one day he told me they were back and hacking his Android phone and installing stuff on it. He took video (as I had asked him to do) because he had fallen asleep and woke up to witness this hacking going on.

I immediately remembered the footage I saw of a person who installed windows 1.0 and then updated and updated etc through all the versions to see if he could update it to modern Windows (he did).

That's what was on his phone. That very video. And still no hackers, because there wasn't anything unusual on his devices at all, save for that one-sided conversation on his phone. I believe he fell asleep while watching a playlist, and woke up when that video came on. That video is also several hours long, so he could have just started it, fell asleep, then woke to see this.

But there was nothing being installed on his phone. Besides, windows cannot be installed on Android.

So I dropped the case (like the investigators mentioned here.) because I definitely don't feel good about taking money from someone only to repeatedly find that they had triggered the things that were frightening them, or that the things were simply imaginary.

I'm not saying this is the case here. But I will say that everything about it is so very similar. I'm almost ready to convince myself you're the same person because this story is so similar. Only this one wasn't in Germany.

1 comments

I have a friend (in Germany) which diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and it was similar. He refused to use MS Windows because it was bugged, any error message would start a new fear. He used Tails but later didn't trust that either. He installed Linux but only from a CD he ordered as downloading anything might have been tempered with. "They" were after him. "They" also had a secret hiding place in his walls and tried to kill him several times. He's better now but I have cache of old emails, one crazier than the next.
2023 is hard. Taken in isolation everything really is “bugged” and “tampered with”.

You can only get so many “oops security incident” emails from various providers in a row before you get more paranoid.

Then if you have a predilection for paranoid schizophrenia, it’s not faeries and demons that haunt you, it’s 23andMe hacks and Windows rootkits.