My friends Instagram was hacked and deep-fake videos posted in less than 6 hours

Today has been wild. I am quite shocked at how quickly the whole thing happened and how difficult it is to report the hacked account to instagram and try recover the account. The docs seem to take you in a loop without ever being able to resolve the problem...

My friends instagram account has only ~2,000 followers, so not even a huge amount, and her email and password was reset about 6pm to a gmail account, and by midnight the account had already posted deep-faked AI videos of her promoting cryptocurrency scams.

The deepfake videos are very realistic too, if I hadn't know her better or know about the hacking it would be very easy to believe it was real...

It's possible they deep-faked her videos ahead of time but it seems like something you'd only spend resources on only if you knew the attack was successful.

And there doesn't seem to be that much news or content online about this happening or it seems very targeted... but for such an account with such a small following it seems like it must be quite widespread problem.

Have you had this happen to someone you know personally and what do you think about how prepared we are to deal with scams this sophisticated or what effect they might have?

I haven't even thought about them using the content across platforms now that they have the video samples already... but perhaps the followers are more important. You only really hear about celebrity deep-fakes on the news.

I've had my account hacked, too. I used to own: https://www.instagram.com/kaler/

Have owned it since Instagram launched and it was connected to my Facebook account which I've had since 2005 or so.

There is no hope with contacting Instagram/Facebook support.

Can you contact law enforcement or lawyer to get a take down the account?

In an ideal situation I'm sure that could work, but I'm not sure if law enforcement would have any more luck getting hold of instagram help & support in this case. I also don't really know much about deep-fakes yet and if they do fall under some kind of copyright law and how that would work across international borders. I think it's very new problem that might not have a clean solution yet.