The Mystery of the Stolen Identity

Two days ago my husband told me that my brother was online on yahoo messenger. This puzzled me for two reasons.
1. It was almost midnight. He never came online at that time.
2. His final board exams were taking place and he was supposed to be studying for that. (For those unfamiliar with the board exams in India all I can say it is life and death matter for us :) )

So I decided to investigate into the matter. I messaged him twice on the messenger but did not get a response on either occasions. This could only mean one thing - his id had been hacked. Now this was bad news. I got worried and told my brother about this. He also wondered about who could have done that.

Yesterday again we found the culprit online with my bro's id. This time my husband took matters into his hand and instead of sending a tame 'Hi' he sent a threatening note about reporting him to the police for having stolen the id. Now we both knew it was a harmless threat coz first of all how were we going to get his ip and then track him down?

Guess what the threat worked. The person who was using the id got scared and sent in a confession :) He turned out to be a friend of my brother. He also sent in a detailed explanation that my bro had signed in using his PDA and due to some problem in the PDA it automatically signed in using my bro's id instead. He sent a long explanation about trying to figure out how to resolve it. He immediately text messaged my bro also about it.

Today I called my brother and told him about it and we all had a good laugh. The funniest part was that his friend ultimately uninstalled yahoo messenger and reinstalled it. Wow... What a classic case of stolen identity and problem caused by technical problems in Yahoo.

Well that solved the mystery. And what a fast closure :)