9:27
welcome to this very special episode of bite size we have got a lot of behind-the-scenes news for you because let me tell you it has been one of the craziest few months in this channel's history yeah as you may not have noticed our entire channel got hacked our entire youtube channel has been turned into a bitcoin scam and we thought we had lost all our videos all our hard work from the past five years in this video we're gonna talk to you about how it happened and the incredible journey on how we got our channel back yes guys and please make sure you stay until the end of this video because i have a very important announcement arguably the biggest news that we've ever shared on this channel something new is coming and trust me
when i say you're not going to want to miss this episode is brought to you by nordpass it's seriously the best place to generate secure passwords and stay safe online and as this video details there has never been a time when your online presence needs the utmost protection right shall we get into this should we explain how we got deleted youtube took down our channel and we got hacked to death by evil hackers so where does this story start i think it starts starts with me doesn't it all started just a wee bit eye i had finished school and i checked our email and one of the fortunate things about the budgeteers is we get lots of emails from companies that want to work with us and
sponsor some of our videos and that's part and parcel of having a youtube channel and sometimes we work with people if the brand and the product aligns if we use it already if we had never heard of it but we think it's awesome and it's it's one of the ways we finance our big series in between big series and so this professional looking email came in saying we have this new software can you remember what it was called it was called uh and the way they had done it they had made a fake website that had buttons and you could scroll and see pictures that they had completely fabricated but it looked really professional like these hackers had done their homework they had dangled a carrot in front of my eyes they were like hey
you know this is the software you can customize your facebook customize your social media pages you don't have to have the default and i was like oh that is kind of interesting it's not really aligned with the budgeteers but i'll take a look um anyway um like i normally do um i normally check them out and then if they pass the first test which is oh that is actually kind of cool then we can start talking to them because obviously if someone just sent me a link saying download this software i'd probably say no um but because they've gone to the effort of making this fake website it looks legit and so i fell for it and i downloaded the software and immediately it didn't work and i emailed them right back and said
oh it downloaded but i can't find it on my desktop i don't know where it is and it was gone and i and they were and they on their end they're reading your email thinking you're a stupid little idiot so but this is where it happened like they just needed to get paddy to download the link it installed on his computer and in one minute i checked in one minute they stole our entire channel because they went into his browser got all his passwords and then got access to our both our gmail and our youtube and in one minute i checked they changed our password they changed the email that it's linked to everything uh they changed it to uh to their email address and phone number it's crazy they went from like uh belarus to the netherlands
to somewhere in russia so it wasn't a software it was an open door an open invitation like come in take your shoes off have a drink you want a beer gin and tonic what can i get you here's all our five years of business and do you know that this was like five six weeks ago now right and i um the i haven't told you this but that night i was um having a tinder date and i was cooking dinner and as i was cooking dinner tai's emails me and says did someone just change our password and my stomach fell down into my bowel area because no one would change our password and i knew i had that dodgy interaction with the software i was trying to entertain and cook dinner and i bought all these
ingredients and i had a nice bottle of red wine i didn't notice i was freaking out i was like patty would be on a date while we're getting hacked i tried to juggle my emotions but i didn't feel hungry i didn't feel like talking this poor girl i poured her a glass of wine and told her to go play playstation i was like i've really got to sort something out is that make yourself at home do you guys remember that a few weeks earlier um someone else much less professional tried to hack us and i was able to change the password and then we had a whole conversation about how wouldn't it be the worst thing ever if we oh my god and so this is my favorite part of the story so we're we're like we're worried we're locked out of our
our gmail and i was on the phone with a good friend of mine who lives in chiang mai who has a youtube channel called nick nimmin and he does all the back end youtube stuff his whole channel's around youtube and he knows people in youtube like he literally is in contact with the big cats and i said to him like we're being hacked what should we do and he's like okay calm down calm down um contact these people contact these people ties you had managed to contact a specialist in belgium because you'd been to the youtube uh headquarters and you'd been networking quite a few times right so you immediately emailed the brussels team and i was emailing through nick yeah within half an hour i was emailing with uh the one of the guys at youtube uh being
in lux so the europe division immediately they sent me through with the specialists i was like block our account now ty's was like ty's was the [__] like superhero during this time he just like was on it every single day but it's it's like penny said suddenly we got a notification it was two o'clock in the afternoon for me and suddenly i got another notification your the budgeteer's password has changed i was like well this is weird nobody's really we're not uploading a series what's happening i was like guys does that anybody if you just change it and you're like no i'm like [__] [__] this is not good and penny was like what's going on isn't it siri i was like if someone's changed our password they got access to
everything they can do whatever they want and they're like what can they do i'm like they can delete our videos they can lead our channel they can do pretty much whatever they want and then suddenly everyone starts like oh [__] this is really serious yeah i remember i was at the gym obviously and um look at those guns hello and i was at the gym if you want to look if you want to have those guns contact lena hello hi my number's right here um seriously i was at the gym and i get the message and so like in between sets i like take a second to try to get on our because i have our gmail connected to my phone so i try to log in and usually if you try to log in from another device or whatever it says it sends you a verification code and all it said
was you changed your password an hour ago and i was like no i didn't oh my god and there was that um period where we had been hacked and they hadn't done anything they hadn't changed anything they hadn't deleted videos they hadn't done anything dangerous yeah and i said to thais i said hey maybe they're just gonna piss around and then that's it and it was getting late for me it was like midnight and i had to go to school the next day and what happened with the dates yeah did she polished off the rest of the red wine and then left and um because i couldn't really hold a conversation i didn't want to eat the dinner we haven't seen each other since but the heck ruins more than just our channel paddy is still single we'll link his
number down below and um what happened then is when i went to bed i said to guys like look i'm gonna go to bed you know i need to sleep nothing's happening we haven't we've been hacked but they haven't done anything this is my favorite part of the story this is like where i just like i laughed so much this is where i'm saying it could get worse and we're like well maybe we might still be lucky and not be hacked you know just like praying yeah so patty you recount your portion and then ties and i will recount because we were awake so i go to bed and our channel is fine it's there it's called the budgeteers there's our videos there's our playlist everything is there everything is normal um and the hackers have changed our
password that's it so i'm like okay it's been full five hours now they haven't done anything i need to go to sleep when i wake up in the morning i kind of like brush my teeth how to shave and then i was like oh let me check what's going on with the channel and our channel is called nasa news and we are live streaming as i turn on my phone as i'd open youtube we are live streaming um a scam like a live feed of ellen musk talking about some kind of thing and our channel all our videos were gone disappeared we couldn't see any of our videos the only video that was on was the current video that was streaming this scam this live i don't even know what it was and i was just laughing on the toilet i was giggling to myself like what is going on like
this has to be the craziest thing that's ever happened to the channel we're live streaming an ellen musk bitcoin scam and we're called nasa news and that's when i just kind of was like okay um i'll message you guys and i'll get ready and i'll go to school and by the time i messaged you got ready went to school and i'd done my first period of teaching and i had a little break i checked again we had just been taken off youtube completely the entire channel was gone disappeared deleted and that's when i remember just kind of like mentally like just shutting down like our channel is gone like i thought the hackers had just deleted everything they made some money and then left and deleted everything on the way out that's
basically what i thought let's go back let's rewind patty just went to sleep yeah so we got different time zones going so patty's already asleep but for us it's like oh almost evening we're like it started at 2 p.m and now it's evening and we're like well and then suddenly our channel changed the budgeteers wasn't no longer the budgeteers we were nasa news we were a bitcoin scam i yeah so i call tithe well i called the both guys but obviously i didn't think patty would would pick up because he was asleep and ty picks up and i was like times you have to look at our channel and he gets on and it's called nasa news live and ty's and i are just watching as this guy is completely changing our channel lina's like
freaking out i'm like the same reaction as patty just like just having to laugh because it's just absurd it's crazy you're you're completely powerless so we're just watching there saying like oh well that's five years of work and all our videos down the drain we're officially a bitcoin scam now it's but then because but because we were sitting there and we were like luckily lena changed the instagram uh password fast enough so we're like [__] we need to warn people that we've not changed into a bitcoin scam so i'm like we're rushing it's it's sunday evening we're like ditched all our plans and uh so i quickly made something to post on uh on instagram telling everyone like guys somebody hacked our account don't follow don't take any of the advice don't buy
any bitcoins from us that got a lot of reaction so all the people saw that we've uh suddenly turned into a nasa news everyone started contacting us and then this is my favorite part of the story so as all this is happening like i mean like both guys have said we've we've just lost five years of work blood sweat and tears we're just trying to laugh because you can't do anything else so then what do i thought it would be funny if i change our group chat name to nasa news live so i changed the name from the budgeteers to nasa news live and then i just left it there for the guys to see and a few hours later patty writes back and goes houston we have a problem but at this point it's been a few hours and i have now forgotten that i
changed the name to nasa news live so i thought all i see on my phone is nasa news live says and i was like oh my god the hackers have contacted me directly they found my facebook and they've contacted me directly and i swear to god guys i swear i like i look at my phone and i see the lock screen message and i just like put it down on the table as if they're like watching me i like put it down slide it away from me and i open my computer to like write to you guys from somewhere else and i open up facebook to write to you guys and like patty's message pops up and i was like oh my god i changed the name i mean i was running on like very little sleep and oh my god but i really thought that the hacker had directly i was gonna write to
you guys like guys they're trying to ask me for something we realized how crazy it is to lose control over your account like if you simply don't have the access to your passport anymore that's it i can imagine now the feeling of you know building your house and then maybe a flood coming by and just taking your house downstream and you're like standing in the garden just watching your house disappear that's a good description of how it felt yeah oh there he goes well for me it felt like morning a day and i remember every all of our awesome subscribers who were messaging us they were saying like oh are you going to re-upload all the videos and half of me was like nah i didn't want to go through it i didn't want to like re
republish everything i was just thinking like oh no i think it's just if it's gone a big shout out to one of our subscribers ash he told me um that he had all of season series one on a hard drive already so he was offering to give us season one at least and yeah so thank you guys for doing that and for offering at the time it was a bit like you know what let's just let it go down the river and let's build a new house up on that mountain where we can never get flooded again you know um but ty's ties your email that was the best thing that happened to us because what did they say and what was the process of us getting our channel back so the hardest thing is to convince uh them that you are who you say you are
because you can contact anyone from google or youtube saying you are someone but because i have a personal contact with youtube i think convince them like yeah our channel it's been hacked so immediately they sent us me over to um headquarters in dublin and there they blocked our accounts and because they trusted me they said okay we'll we'll try and refer all the information towards my email address but that took weeks so every step was a hard one because the hackers changed everything we needed to give him all the details of our account every information that was linked to it and the hackers changed everything so we tried for weeks to try and re-access our account and nothing was really working
so with a lot of patience and a lot of help from youtube by the way thanks alison who helped us out we finally got our uh account back uh but yeah it looked because they couldn't give any guarantees either that everything was still gonna be there but they were really trying their best so we were left in the dark for a long time but uh eventually yeah we got our account back and uh everything was still there when i opened it all the videos were still there during the um during the process of us not knowing if the team at youtube was going to be able to recover our channel i started researching other channels that got scammed and hacked and got deleted for similar reasons and a few of them never got their channel
back youtube was unable to recover their videos or recover their content um maybe because of the issues that you ran into we all ran into or maybe the hackers deleted the videos um luckily our hackers were not actually focusing on hacking our channel um they were just trying to make some money and so they just unlisted videos they didn't delete the videos that was the big important thing that helped us they unlisted all our videos they didn't delete all our videos if they had deleted our videos ties that's it right we would have been because also what's lovely about having all our videos is all the people that watched it i have given so many lovely comments and that um you know like still daily we get so many views from people watching our old
series so it's really great to see that i found that the most worthy the best thing about this whole experience is that now that the channel has come back and we've been online now for just over 10 days or two weeks by the time that you see this probably um is we said to our subscribers and on instagram as well we said listen the algorithm thinks our channel has died we haven't uploaded or we haven't had any videos to get views for four weeks five weeks six weeks so if you don't mind could you go and just watch a video could you go watch it you know let the algorithm know that we're back and the response has been incr incredible like people are watching series one binge watching series two um and sending me messages and i'm sure you
guys are getting messages as well of like people having beers and watching re-watching old series uh it's made me dig out you know i've been dusting off the youtube um and going back and sitting there and like after i go to the gym i'll come back home and i'll eat my food and i'll watch an episode from india and then i'll watch an episode from sri lanka and from central america and i'm just like i can't believe how many amazing adventures we had and to think that all of that could have got lost forever and like my grandkids would never see it or my kids one day would never see it and for us to never look back and remember all of those adventures because i don't remember them unless i
see them on youtube like my brain is just like i just don't remember trips that much i watched taiwan and i watched the bike trip and i just was like wow okay so i've saved everything we've all downloaded everything offline now and so if the channel does get hacked ever again at least you don't have to worry we will have the videos in the episode let's hope it doesn't happen if anyone's watching this has a youtube channel um and or any kind of social media and gets hacked um similar to how we did like firstly ties how would they stop it from happening because we didn't have any security at all how can and now we do but how can they stop it and then if it happens what would you suggest they do like what's the things you've learned
be critical of the emails that you get sent from if they're from an email with a generic front like what was uh advert team 85 at gmail.com it's not a company it's a generic email second is uh have to wait very verification on your google account which if someone's trying to log in from any direction you give need to give it clear although these hackers were quite smart because they used paddy's computer that was already cleared to access our account so don't install anything and if there's a website uh always uh google it and check for um reviews we also recommend nordpass the sponsor of this video because they provide the best solutions in order to protect yourself from hackers nordpass recognizes suspicious websites so you don't
accidentally reveal your sensitive information it's powered by nordvpn the cybersecurity professionals and nordpass lets you store all of your passwords in one place it also lets you organize your logins and private notes in a secure password vault and you can get access to that vol with one single master password because one issue we had and something that caused the hack in the first place was we were not securing our passwords at all and so nordpass enables passwords to be shared securely so no more password sharing over emails and messenger apps or even just on a piece of paper you can share passwords with the ones you trust really safely so yeah secure yourself online
just like we have now with nordpass and all of the links you need are found below so that is the story of how we got hacked and how we got our channel back and we just want to say again thank you so much for um helping us with that but the video is not finished yet because we have some very deep very personal and extremely important and exciting news for someone in the budgeteers um you've felt nervous about making this public but why don't you finally tell everyone watching your big news okay oh god i'm so nervous all right guys um i really went back and forth about if i should announce this or how i and um the guys already know um and they've been super supportive of um me and my decision and everything
so i just i think it's best to let you guys know that it's crazy because we've known for like a few months now right like we've known like at least three months so i don't care i put that up so well and you just ruined it no i uh my stomach i was like wow this is really making me nervous was she is she dying all right okay i mean i'm ready to let the secret out because we've known for at least three months so yeah i have to tell you that i'm preparing a new series to launch it october elena series is coming to the budget here yeah you didn't expect that did you lina explain what is this series when is it coming out what can we expect um yeah okay so two years ago three years ago two years ago i think it was two years ago
um after we finished our india series i went off by myself and traveled for around eight months and um yeah one of the filmings that i did was in kazakhstan i did a small road trip for like 10 days in kazakhstan and filmed the whole thing and uh after putting it off from so much damn time i finally got around to doing it to editing it and uh it's almost ready a few drafts have been sent out already it's coming together um so the advantages of corona and the whole pandemic is yeah you're gonna get another series so sometime in october i don't want to promise any specific dates um but sometime next month i will be releasing a kazakhi baby so lina is the plan similar to how we do it now where we'll upload one episode per week when
they're all finished but if you're a member they'll get to watch the entire series in one turn is that the plan yeah so exactly so the reason i'm not promising any dates is because i really want to have all the episodes finished um and then once they are finished they will be released to our members so if you're not a member you're interested in binge watching a new series guys become a member and if not that's totally cool the series will be available for you and i'll just release one episode a week as we normally do yeah memberships are an extra thank you for all the people that are supporting us and they don't have to wait they can binge watch strangely and uh i just want to say no spoilers i've seen the first
two drafts and it was very good it was like i just had a smile on my face the entire time the people that she travels with the places that she goes um it's eye-opening because this part of the world i can't even picture it or imagine in it and then i see it in her videos and uh you're gonna love this series it's classic budgetears but with no paddy or ties it's just lena and all of the crazy friends that she has so you're gonna love this series guys yeah i hope so ah it's crazy i'm nervous but yeah but now thanks to the hacking we kind of are like more grateful and more enthusiastic we got more energy to put all of this into lena's series and uh make the channel like alive again boost it up again a while now um i've been really stuck at
moments but i feel that like this last month with the hacking it really motivated me and it really pushed me because i was like okay when we come back when we get the channel back because we're getting the um we're gonna need something to like you know re-boot the channel and so yeah it could not have come at a perfect time a more perfect time people are starved of travel content and you don't have to go back and re-watch series you can have a brand new series um and it's going to be so fresh that's the good thing about lena's traveling two years ago you're an oracle lena you knew that in two years nobody in the world is going to be able to travel so i'll just save up for two years that's what's so great about working
with a latina they run on latina time and it's always in the back pocket guys i have that thing i filmed two years ago yeah but seriously it's so uh amazing to see uh how we were able to travel back then like everyone's just like so free ah you can go wherever you want stay as long as yeah and it's also been really fun to like look back on this footage and see i mean me personally because you guys weren't there for this one but i can but this is something that i can see from watching this sri lanka series or more recent videos it's like you see how i filmed or how we used to film and how far we've come as um as a channel and as editors and as videographers and um i mean like it like i said to
the guys i was like i feel like i'm trying to make a masterpiece out of fingerprints it's such a cluster but you got there in the end and that's the true budgeting way is you don't think there's any way of doing it and then you sometimes you give up and then the next day you come at it and you try again and then you figure it out and you think yeah from a different angle we always figure things out normally we don't go the direct route and the easy road everything seems to be a challenge with us that's a given with our budget with a lot of complications well that's always us but it's always the fun the more fun way to go about life and travel and um you know it watching the series as well and made
me miss you guys even more like we've not had a series this year we had to cancel series five or postpone let's say um yeah and potentially series six yeah we had plans to film two seasons this year we planned two series and right now you still get one but you the kazakhstan series um is coming it's like the horrible version of two for the price of one so that's it we that's the end of the video thank you so much for watching and um we've had a roller coaster year and obviously this past six weeks with the hack has just been even more so um it's just been a whirlwind and we can only imagine that everyone else watching this is going through some kind of turmoil so we're with you we're in this
mosh pit of life right now together and we can't physically high-five you or hug you or give you a beer but that's what we want to do in spirit so if you're watching this if you've made it to the end from me um thank you so much for supporting the budgetears i hope 2020 is going as good as can be and let's let's get together and let's let's do something good with this channel and with our day because sometimes it's just as simple as you know finish this video and go do something positive and you'll feel good because that's what i'm going to do and yeah and talking to you guys makes me feel like that too i know it's kind of like when you almost die but then you don't die and then you have this new perspective on life we all we almost lost our channel
but we did it and so now i'm like so motivated to do so much more with this channel it is true and yeah we want to prove in this video that we are doing whatever we can to promote this channel keep it alive uh do so much more even in covet time so and thank you guys all for the support and watching our videos uh so there's a lot coming yeah we love you guys all of you yeah this video is for you guys i love you the most but i love me and my non-existent baby we love you this is the weirdest ending ever
