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Someone has stolen my Instagram account

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Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#221

Post by hyperdimension »

KaiserPro wrote: post #39
deft wrote: post #3

This is a very common thing. In fact influencers and FB employees publicly and loudly talk about this method and no one stops them. "Hey I'm visiting fb headquarters anyone want a new @ or a checkmark?" Why do random fb employees even have this capability?

Just because some vacuous air bag says it, doesn't make it true. Instagram is basically the school playground, but sadly unlike in real life, people can make a career from being "playground" popular.

> vacuous air bag

Colloquialism: 100% understood.

Reality: 0% possible...unless this 'air bag' is full of 'empty'.

In other news, always be careful breaking the neck of a CRT...you'll let the vacuum out!

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#222

Post by lightgreen »

matsemann wrote: post #215
lightgreen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shocking If you are so easier to shock, you will probably die from a heart attack at 30. But seriously, it is an action of one bad employee at worst, this story (if it is even true) can happen in any company. Facebook gets spotlighted simply because it is large.

No, they get spotlighted because when stuff like this happen, it's impossible to resolve or get in touch with a human. If it was resolved after contacting support it wouldn't have been a story.

> it's impossible to resolve or get in touch with a human

I worked in a couple of large internet companies. The army of support people work long hours trying to deal with endless stream of support requests from people who cannot articulate what they actually need, disappear after a couple message, throw insults at support, and in addition to that a lot of fraud requests, spam and so on. I read some of their conversations with users (when they were related to my work), dealing with them is really hard.

I belive companies technically physically cannot do much better at tech support.

When your car breaks, you simply go to repair service, and pay to get the issue resolved.

Asking to cancel any large internet company for bad tech support is childish.

Adult response would be: I want paid tech support.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#223

Post by milofeynman »

throwigemp1 wrote: post #182

I work at Instagram and there's literally zero chance of this happening. I work on the backend, so I know the kind of tools or logging we do. If in the chance this happens remotely, like 1 in a million chance, the employee will be fired like instantly. I can't believe a random tweet with a screenshot is on front page of HN with 500+ upvotes.

That is the software engineer mantra: "There is no way that bug could happen... Oh"

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#224

Post by lightgreen »

heavyset_go wrote: post #217
lightgreen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, Google/Facebook contractors take complaints from Google/Facebook very seriously. What's your point?

The claim that "wrong burger incident" won't be investigated by McDonald's is incorrect. McDonald's takes problems like that very seriously.

When you got poisoned and had to go to the hospital, then yes.

If it was ketchup instead of curry, or if they put 8 nuggets instead of 9, I very much doubt so.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#225

Post by lightgreen »

menage wrote: post #188
lightgreen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when will people learn that Facebook, Google et al do not care at all about individual users? When will people learn, not just Facebook, Google et al, but no large company cares about individual users? Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Ford, Unilever, Visa, Walmart do not care about individual users. Not because all of them are bad, but simply because they physically cannot deal with every complaint. Even worse, when the…

Something like that does exist for Google account access problems - you can pay a few dollars (which also ties you to a presumably-authenticated credit card, and so helps authenticate you to Google) for an expedited response.

Never heard of it. Can you share some link please?

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#226

Post by PragmaticPulp »

renewiltord wrote: post #120
WORLD_ENDS_SOON wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting aspect to this story is that although there's no real evidence that a Facebook employee was involved, it still seems like a believable explanation to many readers including many commenters here. If a company's customer support is so bad that no one can tell the difference between being hacked and being abused by a rogue employee, does it actually matter what happened? I guess that it matters to the ori…

Users here will believe any conspiracy theory so that's not really a high bar. I'm serious. There was that massive 2000 comment thread the other month about some big company doing something evil and then it turned out they didn't do it. Everyone who was right and informed in the original thread was greyed out by users here.

It's not conspiracy theories, it's any story about a big company doing something bad or evil. Or any story that confirms the worldview of the most active HN commenters.

Any story about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Uber, or PayPal doing anything negative tends to bring out the most cynical commenters. HN is usually a skeptical crowd, right until a story arrives that fits their worldview.

The false story about Apple's refund policy that garnered 2000 upvotes before being retracted is a prime example ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 ). When it was in the #1 spot, several people tried to correct the story in the comments. They were heavily downvoted. For some reason, the majority wanted to believe a random Twitter comment over actual iOS app developers trying to correct the misinformation.

Likewise, stories about psychedelics being miracle cures tend to rocket up the front page despite deeply flawed studies (no control group, usually). Meanwhile any study showing negative effects from psychedelics or cannabis tends to get picked apart for for small sample sizes or the evergreen "correlation is not causation" no matter how good the study was.

The real problem is assuming that HN is somehow immune from the same problems as other social media platforms. HN is very much a social media platform.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#227

Post by JdeBP »

ayewo wrote: post #150
renewiltord wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users here will believe any conspiracy theory so that's not really a high bar. I'm serious. There was that massive 2000 comment thread the other month about some big company doing something evil and then it turned out they didn't do it. Everyone who was right and informed in the original thread was greyed out by users here.

For anyone who missed it, here’s the original thread that made the false claim on Twitter that Apple keeps it 30% cut when a customer requests a refund: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 Here’s the follow up retraction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23995750

So not https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506764 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901 then.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#228

Post by abalone »

Kapura wrote: post #16

I think this is indicative of the biggest problem we have had with social media: there is no legalism here, just "codes of conduct" that companies and users both willfully ignore. If your handle gets sold by some facebook employee to a rich kid in LA, what recourse do you have? I don't know what laws this would break (maybe some broad definition of fraud? I Am Not A Lawyer) so it's not like this person has a slam dun…

You’re assuming the attacker was telling the truth about “knowing someone” at Facebook. More likely they figured out how to bypass 2FA (e.g. sim swap, socially engineered a customer service account recovery workflow, etc.)

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#229

Post by mFixman »

throwigemp1 wrote: post #182

I work at Instagram and there's literally zero chance of this happening. I work on the backend, so I know the kind of tools or logging we do. If in the chance this happens remotely, like 1 in a million chance, the employee will be fired like instantly. I can't believe a random tweet with a screenshot is on front page of HN with 500+ upvotes.

If you can't believe a crazy conspiracy theory about Facebook would get 500+ on HN then you haven't been in post-2016 HN much.

Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account

#230

Post by moralestapia »

renewiltord wrote: post #120
WORLD_ENDS_SOON wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting aspect to this story is that although there's no real evidence that a Facebook employee was involved, it still seems like a believable explanation to many readers including many commenters here. If a company's customer support is so bad that no one can tell the difference between being hacked and being abused by a rogue employee, does it actually matter what happened? I guess that it matters to the ori…

Users here will believe any conspiracy theory so that's not really a high bar. I'm serious. There was that massive 2000 comment thread the other month about some big company doing something evil and then it turned out they didn't do it. Everyone who was right and informed in the original thread was greyed out by users here.

It's not only a conspiracy theory. If you hear about the bully at school stealing someone's lunch, you would be inclined to believe it's true, even though you were not there at the time.

Plenty of abuse and mismanagement from these companies have affected a lot of people, to different degrees, and that sets a precedent over which we all subjectively evaluate their actions.

Just last month I had a Twitter account for a side gig banned for absolutely no reason and with zero explanation. I am more inclined to believe the "rich kid from LA" story than the "hack"/"sim swapping" whatever nonsense. Why? Because I see it happening all the time, everywhere.

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