A @Facebook employee has stolen my @instagram account. Thread! (RTs appreciated)
TLDR: some rich kid in LA now has my Instagram account because he got his friend who works at Facebook to steal it... and nobody at Facebook or Instagram is doing anything about it
I’ve had the Instagram account @danny since it launched (10 years ago!). I guess its a pretty sought after @. I get loads of spam, password reset/ login attempt emails etc. So I have it protected with a strong random password and 2 factor auth
I woke up this morning unable to login - Incorrect password. Hmm. Maybe my account has been disabled due to malicious use of the account reporting feature... it’s happened a few times 🙄
Nope. The account is there, it just isn’t mine anymore! How has someone gained access to my account? 99.9% sure I haven’t been phished and I have no 2FA requests anyway. And no emails from Instagram notifying me the email address has been changed etc.
The account is set to private, so I asked my girlfriend to add it to see if we can find out what’s happening. As soon as she does, she gets these messages from him! Then he tries to start a video chat... WTF.
He’s since deleted the messages. It could be nonsense, but I can’t think of any other way of accessing the account. Even if you had my password I would be notified of the login attempt.
Every attempt to contact Facebook/Instagram through the account reporting forms has either been met with silence or an instant “issue resolved” response - which is also pretty weird.
So it seems that employees with the right access at Facebook can just give your account to someone else. What’s happened to all my data? Photos, messages... 10 years of it. Does this guy in LA now have it? Has it been deleted? Will I ever get it back?
As there’s no other way to contact Facebook I’ve submitted it as a security bug in their bug bounty program but I doubt I’ll get anything other than an automated response 😕. What can I do next?
Update: I have the account back! To everyone who shared this post and messaged me with info and offers of help... thank you 🙏 . I really appreciate it. And thanks to the folks at FB/IG who got this sorted. No word yet on what happened or how it was taken...
You can follow @dannyjhall.
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