My life has certainly been interesting lately. A few weeks back, woke up on a Saturday with plans to do some chores and finally get a bike ride in - it's been a long winter. Grabbing my coffee and opening my email I suddenly see our business email flooding with emails from subscribers inquiring about an email they'd gotten from us. Apparently we sold them a bike (that we don't even carry). The email showed what they paid and stated shipping was complete and to "click" for more information. Yep - we were robbed, the new age way. Someone successfully hacked our Mail Chimp account and sent an email to all of our subscribers. On our end, we were fine as we don't retain any financial information on anyone and have secure servers for our online store and run malware daily on our computers but as we all know spam email sucks. I immediately contacted mail chimp - you can only email them, no phone numbers and they wiped the email of any possible malware but meanwhile my phone and email account blew up.
I am always surprised when I learn that people will actually click on anything in a suspicious email but some do. We felt horrible and so violated. We lost a chunk of subscribers, which was sad. Our mail chimp account was frozen for a week, making it a challenge to communicate to purchasers.

Looking back, now that the dust has settled, we did learn that we have many followers and customers who felt our pain and were more worried about us than themselves. Also we certainly reconnected with a ton of people. We had one buyer call us and apologize for his knee jerk reaction and he said he realized it could happen to anyone, then he promptly placed a nice order in the store. Another reader sent us photos of his recent tour to cheer us up.

We'll never know who got into our list or how. We did put another level of security when logging into mail chimp that supposedly makes it impossible for someone else to access and hopefully no more unauthorized emails will be sent.

My advice when you get an email from someone you know but the email content doesn't jive - don't click on anything! Reach out to the sender and verify. While the contacts from readers was overwhelming I was so thankful they reached out to us.

Actually did get out on the bike and I know someday it will stop raining and I will be complaining about the heat