Instagram and Twitter afik the only social media sites that have valuable handles
Eh, Reddit and any OG gamertag.
'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
31–40 of 164 posts
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#32Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves. I have this problem also! I thought it was rare. In my case I think the person is very bad with computers and doesn't know what their email address is. I've gotten emails from their bank, cell phone, and even online dating. I tried ma…
could this be credential stuffing attempts? or just typos?
usually it is someone who has their email john.r.smith or similar and forgets they need the r
There are other stories of people forgetting which company it was with (gmail vs yahoo) and even of google accidentally giving out emails with a period and then silently removing periods.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#34I remember getting a demand I surrender my HoTMaiL address to somebody in a very threatening email to my address way back in 1998. It was kind of surreal back then as the internet was still fresh. Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.
> Nowadays the closest I've gotten to this is the people who keep using my Gmail address as their own email address. I find this behavior rather bizarre and don't know what it achieves.
I have a very common english @outlook.com address. My inbox is always full of bank statements, invoices, and all sorts of business correspondence and bills from all over the world.
It made the address unusable.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#35> Swatters place hoax calls to local police departments, provoking heavily armed SWAT teams to storm the homes of their victims. Haters have swatted online influencers, streamers on
Twitch
, and prominent figures in the tech industry, including Facebook executives and the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. In 2017, the police in Wichita, Kansas, fatally shot a man after they were summoned by a swatting attack over an online match of "Call of Duty."
Ok... this is terrible journalism. They're failing to correctly and accurately identify the parties in play. These aren't "haters", they're unhinged individuals or it's organized crime.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#36Darknet diaries has done a few recent episodes on this topic. Episode 106 is about account handles told from the perspective of the victims, and it is quite sobering. Episode 112 is long interview with an individual who had hacked handles, and it has a look into sim-swapping and some of the tactics around that. Highly recommend ep112.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#37I grabbed a short 2-letter Twitter handle within a few months after they launched. A few years ago I had someone used SIM hijacking to steal access to my phone number. This failed to get access to my Twitter account because I never set up a recovery phone number, however he got access to my Facebook and a few other accounts. I got T-Mobile to fix the SIM swap, but after 3 nights of harassment I just changed my handle. I didn't want to give in but the handle wasn't worth the trouble. On the plus side since Twitter doesn't allow handles that short anymore, once I changed my handle the hijacker's attempts were foiled.
Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#38The person who did this needs to be tracked down and stopped. This is a terrorist and a hateful oppressive evil.
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Re: 'I want your Instagram account': a deadly campaign over coveted handles
#39Instagram and Twitter afik the only social media sites that have valuable handles
People routinely try to get HN ones, albeit by politely emailing.