Locked out of an account
Work through this in order. The likely causes are boring and the order matters, because one of the possibilities changes what you should do first.
Work through these in order
- Confirm you are on a real address. A login that refuses correct credentials is what a clone looks like when it has already taken them. Verify the signature before trying again, not after. If verification fails, stop and treat the credentials as gone.
- Try another address. Sessions are shared across the three doors, so a login failing at one and working at another points at that address rather than your account.
- Build a new circuit. A slow or dying circuit produces failures that read exactly like rejection, including two factor codes that appear wrong.
- Check your clock. Time based codes fail when the machine has drifted, which happens on systems that have been off a while or run isolated. This accounts for a surprising share of these reports.
- Check the username, character by character. Not the password, the username. People change the case or a character and then debug the wrong field for an hour.
- Wait an hour and try again. Repeated attempts hit rate limiting, and rate limiting looks identical to rejection.
If it was compromised
If you get back in and something is different, or you never get back in and verification failed at step one, treat it as compromised and work in this order. The order matters because it puts the thing an attacker can act through first.
- Get in through an address you verified yourself, not the one you were using when it went wrong.
- Change the password to something used nowhere else.
- Reset two factor and save the new recovery material before closing the page.
- Read the message log before anything else. A compromised account is most valuable as a way to talk to people who trust it, so check what was said in your name.
- Check open orders and addresses for anything you did not do.
- Then deal with the balance. It is the obvious worry and it is not the most urgent one.
What will not help
| Thing people try | Why it fails |
|---|---|
| Looking for support outside the platform | It does not exist, and everything claiming to be it is targeting people in your exact position |
| Posting details on a forum | It advertises that you have an account worth attacking and invites private messages from strangers |
| Trying a dozen passwords quickly | Rate limiting, which makes the next hour worse |
| A new address someone offers you | This is the classic follow up to a lockout and the timing is not a coincidence |
| Creating a second account to ask about the first | New accounts have no standing and this does not reach anyone who can act |
If none of it works
Recovery without the material you saved at setup is limited and sometimes not possible. That is a real outcome and it is the reason the account page spends most of its length on saving recovery material at setup rather than on password advice. If you are reading this and did save it, use it. If you did not, the honest answer is that the account may be gone, and the lesson transfers to the next one.