On Monday 20 May my account @mikecoulson48 was hacked and I’m posting this from my secondary account with a mere 137 followers. I need to build up support for @MikeSherburn. Here’s the full story as I told it to Twitter Support, who have been unhelpful!

My account @mikecoulson48 appears to have been taken over by someone with the username @ExecutiveXBadge, I reported it as did some of my friends. It seems I’m not the only one this has happened to.

The account is back in my name but I’m unable to login, because I think the password has been changed. I’m having to use a secondary account @MikeSherburn which only has 130 followers compared to 26.5K for the account I’m trying to recover which severely restricts me from doing anything useful. 

I’m trying to subscribe to X Premium for @MikeSherburn48 but it won’t take effect until my subscription for @mikecoulson48 expires on 2 July. I’m having trouble cancelling my current subscription but would prefer not to do so if I can get access to my primary account. My subscription is paid via Apple Pay with this email address. 

I fail to understand why you can’t relate my email address with my username when it’s the one I used to set up the account. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t used 2-factor authentication, which is something I will need to consider once this problem is settled one way or another. There’s no point me using it on @MikeSherburn48 if there’s any possibility of @mikecoulson48 being restored as I can’t use my email address for multiple accounts. 

Incidentally, I do have another email address which I rarely use and is no longer accessible on my iPad, only on my Android phone, so it’s no use for present purposes.

I really need to login to my primary account to be able to do anything useful, not only because the one I’m using has a very limited reach but because I need access to drafts and bookmarks.