Skepticism is warranted but, did everyone forget about a month (?) ago when an insider and "OG username" people did the bitcoin scam on twitter? It's not an unreasonable assumption that this can happen elsewhere.
Someone has stolen my Instagram account
51–60 of 351 posts
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#52Please upvote this story — if it gets enough attention, someone at FB or IG might act.
Dont. This is HN not a support attention army.
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#53There's no evidence to back the user's claims. This sounds like "Hey my dad works at Xbox and will ban you". There are other ways to compromise an Instagram account, like sim swapping ( https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/t-mobile-employee-made-u... )
If that was the case why would FB be marking the issue as resolved?
Kinda depends on the specifics of the issue. "I can't login." Send password reset, new account owner says thanks, all good. Resolved.
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#54There's no evidence to back the user's claims. This sounds like "Hey my dad works at Xbox and will ban you". There are other ways to compromise an Instagram account, like sim swapping ( https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/t-mobile-employee-made-u... )
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 original poster, and I do hope that they do get their photos / account back, but in either case the message the message I'm taking away from the story same: your Facebook account could disappear tomorrow and you'd have no recourse.
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#55I 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…
I don't think the "theft" of the username would break any kind of law, as this was a company decision (since it done by an employee) and the username was never your property anyway. I'm assuming that employee definitely violated some internal policies, but nothing from a legal point of view.
The only recourse I can see from a legal point of view is that they seem to have handed over the entire account (as the followers seem to have been carried over), which contains private data including DMs, stories, archives of deleted pictures, etc. Given that the original owner of the account is based in the UK, GDPR should apply. I wonder if people he talked to via DMs (as well as those with private accounts who granted his account access) would also have a case, since Facebook's actions have disclosed private conversations & contents of private accounts) to an unauthorized person.
I don't have a Twitter account but if someone could suggest this person to complain to their local data protection regulator (the ICO in case of the UK) that would be great.
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#56The arbitrariness with which these companies rule over our digital lives infuriates me more from month to month. We do our best to fight dictators in the physical world but somehow accept them in the digital realm.
You're welcome to start a zine to reach your audience, but nobody owes you a platform they built and pay for.
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#57This reminded me of an article I read a while ago about Instagram employees selling verification... one of the sources mentions they also sell accounts, but the story is mostly about selling verification.
https://mashable.com/2017/09/01/instagram-verification-paid-...
Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15156790
Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#58Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#59Re: Someone has stolen my Instagram account
#60There's no evidence to back the user's claims. This sounds like "Hey my dad works at Xbox and will ban you". There are other ways to compromise an Instagram account, like sim swapping ( https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/t-mobile-employee-made-u... )
It's believable though. The culture around "OG" accounts really is that weird. It's easy enough for a Facebook policy team to confirm this one way or the other by looking at the logs. If this gets enough visibility I assume that will happen.
This reminds me of the federal indictment against consultants bribing amazon employees.
If Instagram account takeover favors can occur, how much do they cost?