After more than a year of reading other people’s tweets, I decided to set up a Twitter account of my own.
Somehow, someone had already set up a Twitter account using the email address I use for social media, which prevents me from setting up my own Twitter account.
What’s even worse is that this person’s native tongue is one of the Oriental languages - looks Chinese, but I’m not sure. I’ll refer to the language as Chinese below, but keep in mind that I don’t even know that much.
I did manage to change the password, so I’ve got effective control of the account. Or I would, except that everything on my Twitter page is in Chinese. All the help screens are in Chinese. When I Google ‘Twitter help’ the page that comes up is in Chinese.
I’d like to just delete the account, so that I can create a new one using that address. But damned if I even know where to start. Any ideas?
I had something similar happen with a gmail address I usually only use for “official” type stuff, like job applications. Someone else used that email to set up a facebook account. I’m really paranoid about that account now, and set up 2 factor auth for anything I associate it with.
Thanks, buckgully, that actually got me most of the way there. Only problem was their online form for dealing with this had a Captcha at the end, the form as presented to me was a mix of Chinese and English, and while I could fill in the form OK with the help of translation programs on the Web, the Captcha was screwed up, so I couldn’t prove I was a human.
I’ve Googled a phone number and an email for Twitter customer service, and they both tell you to go to the website, read the FAQs, and use the forms. Been there, can’t do that.
I found a page with fields to select the language, time zone, country, and stuff like that. This would allow me to set English as the language of this account. And hopefully after that I could use Twitter’s forms to take things from there.
But I can’t copy the Chinese text in the buttons (it is Mandarin Chinese, fwiw) to put it into a translator. So I have no idea which button is which.
If anyone with a Twitter account could go to that page in their own account, and tell me which button(s) will save my changes, I’d deeply appreciate it.
I had the same thing happen with my gmail address I’d created several years back - I’d created the email address as my firstnamelastname@gmail.com. Friends kept texting me facebook links that I couldn’t look at without a facebook account so in 2016, I finally decided to create an account with MY gmail address - it kept coming back that an account was already set up and to please enter my password… HUH? I clicked the “I FORGOT my password” link, had facebook email me a new one and I was able to gain control.
Once I gained access, I spent some time looking through the account. It had been used a lot! There was quite a bit of personal info and photos of a 26 yr old male person & his family who lived in India…He had created the account way back in 2011. He also had a bunch of Indian “friends” listed. I deleted EVERYTHING … all the personal information, timeline history, activity history and friends list. I then took advantage of every way facebook offers to make the account private and secure. BUT I still get all kinds of strange “People YOU may know” friend suggestions because of this… lots of Indian people.
I still don’t know how this person was able to do this. My gmail account was never hacked AND I always create really weird passwords that I change regularly. I don’t know if facebook required email confirmation back then when creating a new account. I would guess that they did but I KNOW this person never had access to my email account. So HOW?