Why Suzanne's hacked 'IT'S BEEN A NIGHTMARE'

It’s enough to make anyone lose their luminous glow! How the TV favourite had her life scarily turned upside down

- Wendyl Nissen

Suzanne Paul is the much-loved infomercial queen who can sell anything to anyone and is a well-known celebrity both in New Zealand and Australia. But recently, her celebrity status meant she was the victim of an extremely nasty hacking.

“It’s been a nightmare and it still is a nightmare,” says Suzanne, who is keen to warn people about how easy it is to have someone take over your social media accounts and disrupt your life.

“I am Facebook friends with broadcaster Steve McIvor, who had been hacked but didn’t realise it. So when I got a message from him asking me to ‘like’ his new brand of menswear, I thought, ‘Why not?’ I was happy to click on the link and give him some support.”

But then everything went black. Immediately after she clicked on that link, she lost her Instagram, Facebook and Messenger accounts. They had disappeared and she could no longer log into them.

 “I couldn’t even get a message out to my followers that I had been hacked, so they kept getting these cryptocurrency messages telling them I had made heaps of money and telling them to do it too,” says Suzanne.

As she and husband Patrick Kuhtze tried desperately to report the hacking and get access to the accounts again, the hacker put up a picture of Suzanne holding a glass of Champagne on a private family messenger group Patrick had set up with his four sons, their partners and grandchildren. The hacker, pretending to be Suzanne on her birthday, said, “Hey, it’s my birthday. Wish me a happy birthday!”

“That was really scary,” she recalls. “It was obvious to us then that he had all my personal details and I would never get them back.”