Mike Berkens filed a lawsuit against Twitter for his hacked account @TheDomains

Mike Berkens domain name investor and blogger at TheDomains.com has filed a lawsuit against Twitter after his Twitter account @TheDomains was hacked on the 22nd of December, 2017.

Mike Berkens is using a temporary Twitter account until this whole mess is resolved @TheDomainsCom.

It is not clear how the Twitter account was hacked but it seems that Twitter support has been unresponsive in the past few days and this lead to this lawsuit.

The hacker has made several tweets (then deleted some) and has also asked for donations using Bitcoin. Please beware and don’t have any contact with the hacker. If you can please report the hacking to Twitter. Hacker was asking for ransom to return the account to Mike.

The complaint was filed by Michael Berkens and his company Worldwide Media Inc. against Twitter and the unknown hacker. You can find it here in pdf “WorldwideMedia-v-Twitter-complaint-20171227“.

Plaintiffs bring this action to recover their Twitter account, @TheDomains, as well as to secure other injunctive relief and an award of damages. The Account was created by Plaintiffs in November 2008. The Account has more than 28,000 followers, nearly 29,000 likes, and has distributed more than 56,000 tweets.

Despite many instances of actual notice from Plaintiffs and many of Plaintiffs’ readers, on information and belief, Twitter still has done nothing to substantially acknowledge, investigate or respond to Plaintiffs’ complaint, and restore Plaintiffs’ access to the Account.

This is yet another reminder not to build your online “kingdom” on social media ONLY as your accounts can vanish in a second. Mike has his popular blog so he can keeps readers updated on the state of this hacking and continue writing his articles. Also it is a reminder to activate 2 factor authentication to as many services that you use and offer it.

(Thanks to George Kirikos of Leap.com for providing us a copy of the complaint.)