Would you please recover my password? Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. So
I'm not going to read you all of the questions.
I'll show them to you here on the screen.
But they all start with things like Somebody's hacked my account,
or I'm not able able to log into my Yahoo account or I've forgotten my password.
They all end up asking, Could I please recover the account for them?
Could I recover their password for them?
Could I somehow regain access to their account on their behalf?
The answer is really, really simple.
No, there is nothing I can do for you.
I have no way to help you.
Here is what you can do.
How to recover your password?
It's simple, but it's got to work.
You have to have planned ahead whatever service it is you're attempting
to sign into for which you have lost your password.
Begin with the account recovery process using the forgot password link or trouble
signing in link or whatever other alternative wording they might be using
on their page that says, yeah, I'm having trouble logging in.
I don't have my password. I don't know what's going on.
Help me. They are the only ones that can help you.
Now, I get a lot of people who contact me
after making at least a cursory attempt at that, and that's great.
But beyond that, I still can't help you.
The important thing to realize is that you should, even though I know you're
panicking, follow the instructions slowly, carefully and completely.
It's very common for many of these
services to offer you more steps if the initial steps they offer you fail.
For example, if your account recovery address, your alternate email address,
or your mobile phone or whatever it is doesn't work.
Sometimes not all services,
but sometimes they will offer you a way to say, okay, fine,
give us a bunch of information and we will have somebody look at it
and see if perhaps we can confirm that it's really you.
That's it.
Those are the options.
If those options can't be made to work,
you've lost your account.
There's nothing I can do.
I don't have any superpowers.
I don't have any hidden back doors.
I don't have any ways to hack the account on your behalf.
The only thing you can do is follow
the resources offered by the service you're attempting to sign into.
That's it.
I don't have any tools that you don't have available already.
And to be clear, I wouldn't even if I did have super tools.
Why?
Because I have no idea you're the right person.
I have no idea you are the legitimate account holder.
I have no way to verify that.
In fact, all the ways to verify that are
the very things you were just unable to complete.
I don't have anything beyond that.
I don't have any way to confirm that you are the right person.
You could just be trying to scam me into hacking someone else's account
I won't do it. Now the one thing I want to point out here
is I want to be very clear that you should not fall for scams.
One of the things I'm finding on YouTube
especially is that there are a tremendous number of scammers leaving comments
that imply that they could recover hacked accounts.
Same thing applies to them.
They don't have any super tools,
they don't have any back doors, they don't have any magic that you and I
don't have so they can't do anything more than you could do yourself.
They're just in it for the money.
They want to fool you into thinking they will deliver something they cannot deliver
and you will pay for it upfront and they will disappear.
So the very bottom line is
if you're using a free service like Outlook.com or gmail or Yahoo or any
of the others and you forget or lost your password and you did not set up alternate
email addresses or alternate phone numbers and keep them up to date
and customer service isn't responding to you or there is no customer service.
You are out of luck.
You have lost your account.
I know of no way to recover it.
I certainly cannot help you if that happens to you.
Please learn from the experience.
Make sure you do the right things to keep your account secure.
Choose Strong passwords Use a password
Manager Don't share your password with anyone set up your alternate email
address and phone number or both with the account and always keep your
alternate email address and phone numbers up to date with that account.
I'm sorry to have to say it yet again
but I cannot recover your account or your password.
I'm sorry. For updates for related links, for comments and more visit askleo.com/2724
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.