Finding the absurdity in getting hacked - Brighton date
When stand-up Amy Mason got hacked, she lost her number, bank account and social media access. And then the hackers started sending her gifts... surprising and rather filthy gifts, all part of a strange dive into connection, intimacy and the perils of using your dead cat's name as your password for literally everything.
Amy explores it all in the show Behold! which she brings to Brighton Komedia on Thursday, April 23 and Guildford G Live (Bellerby Studio) on Friday, April 24.
“It all started when I started getting these unusual items anonymously in the post,” she explains. “I had no idea where they came from so I started to try to find out and it turns out I'd been hacked. My telephone number had been transferred to somebody else’s sim card and so they were able to ask for and get reminders for all my passwords. They had pretended that I had lost my phone and that I needed to transfer my phone across. They hacked my accounts and ordered lots of weird items to my house. There are various theories why they do that. One there is that they need to do that with credit cards so that the companies think something is going to a registered address. But I don't know. It's just something that happens to a lot of people.
“It was weird, and then when I realised what had happened it was exhausting trying to sort things out but quite soon I found the absurdity of the whole thing to be quite funny. I just thought that what was happening was mad. I did feel a bit vulnerable but I told myself that it wasn't personal. I just assumed that this was happening to thousands of people that they were doing it to in the same scam from the same data centre somewhere. I lost £7,500 on a credit card but I managed to get it back.”
It turns out that the particular phone company she was with wasn't great for security; she's learned that multi-step verification is the best approach.
“But for me the thing that I've found so bizarre was that I found it quite funny and absurd... these adult items that they were sending me. I went on stage two days after it happened and just started talking about it, and just me talking about it made people laugh. And I realised that it would actually make a good show. It had a natural link into how we live our lives online and what happens when our digital life can have real consequences in our real life if we are not cautious enough.”
But no, the show is not a cautionary tale: “It's entertainment. It's a really silly show. Definitely people really enjoy it a lot and really relate to it. It is about spending too much time online, too much time scrolling and using your phone too much. It is about my relationship with social media and stuff like that. I know that I do it too much, far, far too much. It is about how we like to think that we've got friendship and community through what we're doing online.”
Amy has appeared on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz, Huw Stephens’ Roundtable on BBC 6 Music and Hypothetical with Josh Widdicombe and James Acaster on Dave. She was shortlisted for BBC New Act of the Year 2022 and featured in the Guardian's Top 10 Funniest Jokes of Edinburgh Fringe 2024. She has multiple TV shows in development with production companies including Clerkenwell and BBC Studios.