After reading an article about stolen HBO Max accounts in Latin America, today I fell victim to it.

It took over 30 minutes to get my account back. Here's what I discovered:

1. The hacker logged into my account and changed name, email address and password. When I saw a email notification of account changes, I reset the password but was unable to relink my cable subscription to my HBO Max account.

2. Support asked for my name, email address and zip code. She also asked for a screenshot of my still logged-in device and a billing statement of my cable provider showing a HBO Max subscription. (You may be subscribed through a different provider). After verification, she was able to provide me with a temporary password to my own/old account but under the hacker's email address. I was able to log in using the hacker's email address and this temporary password and change everything back.

3. I hit a road block when I changed the email address back to my own one when the system said the email is already in use. This is where it hit me that the hacker tricked us by creating a new account using my own email address immediately after account takeover to make recovery more difficult and confusing. When I reset the password earlier before reaching out to support, unbeknown to me, I only recovered this new dummy account that has no watch history / profiles or an active subscription linked to it. When I reached out to chat support for a solution, I was told I had just created a new account. That answer threw me off as I only used the recover password function. This email address in use error explains what the support meant that there’s a duplicate account. I shared this discovery with support that there are two separate accounts. My own/old account is under the hacker's email. Make sure you have the hacker's email address on your stolen account when you reach out to support. Otherwise they may not even be able to pull up your real account with your own email address.

4. Logged back to the new account the hacker created and changed that email address to something different.

5. Logged back to the hacked one and updated my email to my original one and logged out all devices. This time everything is all set.

I’m behold broke and nobody i know has HBO Max to let me use their account, is there anything I can do to get it for free? Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Hi did anyone else get this or is this a scam!??

Im such a big fan of this musical but because it wasnt selling well my local cinema stopped showing it. I'm from the UK so I've bought a VPN and everything but I only now realised that HBO Max doesnt offer free triaks and I don't have enough for the ad-free version (needed to watch the film). You could change the password in 3 or 4 hours I just am really desperate to see this film. If you could then just DM me please!!