It got hacked by some scammer. There were a whole bunch of accounts hacked around the same time then. I didn't use a very strong password as I felt a forum wasn't a particularly critical website, but still sucked.
Did you even attempt to convince theymos or other admins to recover your account? I agree with you and recall that there were quite a few accounts that were hacked during various periods, and it seems that that mine, Adam's and quite a few others were hacked in late 2016. Was yours hacked in 2017?
I think that there were a large number of usernames and passwords that were stolen (a kind of data breach, if I recall? but it may have also been related to the Yahoo data breach or another one that caused access to info that was also used on the forum?)
I got mine back within about two weeks, and various kinds of attempting to prove my account, which were a bit lame, but it seems that I provided a sufficient amount of info to recover my account.
My second screw up was when I got locked out of my account from a screwy way of trying to recover my password.. I think that was November or December 2016, and I was unable to use my account for over a month.. with my continuous petitioning, but finally admin gave me back my account.
Last legit post was August 3, 2017. Hacker started posting August 5th, 2017.
I didn't have a private key of a staked bitcoin address, which they required for me to prove I owned the account.
In any case, that account now also has negative trust and is marked as a 'scammer', not sure how I would go proving that that wasn't performed by me, so not sure how desirable it is to get the account back. They froze the account though, so it's not active anymore. My biggest regret looking back was not reporting the hack earlier. Had I not procrastinated, maybe some people would not have been scammed out of their money.
There may be a bit of luck involved, and surely, you are correct that there would be a need to take action quickly.
I cannot recall exactly the sequence of events, but I am pretty sure that I had attempted to log into my account about 8-12 hours after it had been taken over, and I was not successful, which took me a couple hours more to figure out what to do, which was to create a temporary account to report my hacked account.
I am pretty sure that by the time I reported my account Cyrus had already locked the account - yet I cannot recall what role my reporting played in getting my account reactivated, but it seems that higher ranked accounts have a certain value (my account already had Legendary rank at that time), and the hacker made a large number of communications to transact BTC value, and there were a few communications that showed that BTC transactions were about to take place - but my account was frozen before the BTC value was actually transacted.
Perhaps there would have been more suspicion about me, if BTC had actually been transacted under my account.
That loss of my account did cause me to understand a bit more that there remains a decently high degree of value to a BTC forum talk account that has quite a bit of time and good will - even if some forum member peeps might hate me a little bit on their insides... hahahahaha
By the way, one of the first things that I did, after receiving access back to my account was to send a PM to each of the members who the hacker had communicated with through my account in order to attempt to explain the situation and to explain my regrets and to make sure that they did not harbor continued grudges towards me in regards to my telling them that there was not going to be a transaction - and the fact of the matter was that the kinds of transactions that were being conducted was the selling of forum accounts, so it was not exactly exemplary peeps on the other end of the in-progress hacker transaction that was cancelled by me, either.