I'm among the first 6000 users of Instagram and my first name username was stolen a few years ago. Support for verified accounts acknowledged the issue, but couldn't do anything about it.

This turn was an AI exploit, in my case was an outsourcing support 'exploit', where someone paid for my username to be manually changed and given to another user. There will always be a way to get access to accounts if human accountable support doesn't exist, with criminal consequences for employees that violate it.

▲

qingcharles 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I had a Threads account banned recently because I liked five posts too quickly and they said my account was "inauthentic", even though the attached Instagram account is just fine. I tried to use the Meta Verified support and they told me I had used my full quota of support already (!?) and refused any requests.

	▲	prism56 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Delete the accounts and move on... They don't deserve your time and business.

▲

cactusplant7374 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you sue? I assume there is a financial motive with this crime.

▲

jubilanti 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Sue who? Meta? You "consented" in the Terms of Service to waive your right to a trial and only get forced arbitration by an arbitrator of Meta's choosing.

Sue the anonymous person who stole your account and sold it to someone else, who is probably nowhere near your jurisdiction? Good luck.

▲

parable 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Meta has the capability to find out who authorized the change to this person's account. They log every change done in their administrator panel with a scary level of granularity, as far as I know, and they're able to take actions against employees who go behind Meta's back and take bribes (which, in joao's case, is what happened). This enforcement creates "waves" of account thefts described like so:

Suppose Mallory finds the contact information for Alice, an Instagram employee working overseas. Alice is paid next-to-nothing and wouldn't mind Mallory's extra cash. Mallory posts to their Telegram channel: "Instagram account takeovers for sale! Pay me $5,000+ and I'll take over ANY Instagram account". Mallory gets buyers lined up and promises to take over the accounts when Alice is working. The next day, when Alice signs on to the administrator tools, she sets each account's email address to the ones specified by Mallory, and Mallory pays her a percentage of what she charged. Mallory and Alice continue their scheme for about a week, when Meta finally investigates the situation, traces it to Alice's user account, bans or reverts every account Alice helped steal, and terminates her employment. However, no legal action takes place against Alice. Why? That part, I'm not so sure about. They're able to trace every action to Alice, and Alice is not anonymous, thus they have every ability to bring a case against her. Once Alice's employment is terminated, Mallory simply finds another employee willing to do their bidding. New hiring waves make this easy.

I'm happy to go into more detail about the underground Instagram account market. It's fascinating: people bragging about bribing employees and taking advantage of them, knowing their employment will be terminated, and actively showing off how much money they make. Meta has tried in the past to hit certain high-profile people with a cease & desist letter, but those are hard to enforce in certain jurisdictions.

▲

jubilanti 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Meta has the capability to find out who authorized the change to this person's account.

When they want to. Not when YOU want them to.

	▲	parable 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Correct, which is the problem here - they don't want to, and you can't force them to.

▲

pocksuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Clickwrap terms of service are worth the paper they're printed on. You may still be able to sue.

	▲	lenerdenator an hour ago \| parent [-]
		At which point you are going to be competing in court with a company that has a current market capitalization of $1.6 trillion dollars.

▲

stronglikedan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> with criminal consequences for employees that violate it

lol, no. The day someone is criminally charged with "stealing" a username is the day that humanity has lost

	▲	simonw 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The good usernames generally are valued at thousands of dollars or more. Surely stealing something worth that much money should be a crime.
	▲	parable 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You might be interested in reading the court case against Eric Meiggs and Declan Harrington, which includes charges against the two involving extortion and SIM swapping for usernames. See page 10: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.215... While it isn't directly "stealing", the government has brought charges against people in the past for username-related crimes. There are several similar cases, but this is the first one that came to mind.