8 ms·

There'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 acc

by ipsum2 6y ago

There'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-unauthorized-sim-swap-to-steal-instagram-account/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/t-mobile-employee-made-u...)

gsich 6y ago
That depends if the Authenticator was used or normal SMS messages.
maps7 6y ago
If that was the case why would FB be marking the issue as resolved?
- paxys 6y ago
  Because there's no proof of any malicious activity. It could very well be that the guy Tweeting is trying to take over the account.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ipsum2 6y ago
  I don't know, but it sounds like the issue was resolved (correctly or incorrectly) the first time, so the user started filing a ton of issues, which were automatically marked as duplicate. Now he's spamming the white hat security form (https://twitter.com/dannyjhall/status/1310231761444581385 https://twitter.com/dannyjhall/status/1310231761444581385), which is not likely to get him a response.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    “Spamming?” If repeated complaints about an issue the company won’t resolve is what we call spam now, I’m speechless.
    - verroq 6y ago
      He is a “free” user, what duty does Facebook owe him?
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
        Are we talking legal duty or “not being an asshole” duty? I’d argue it’s at least the latter, where the case should be pretty clear.
      - mumblerino 6y ago
        Ah yes sure you don’t pay Google a dime, so don’t you worry if you lose your account tomorrow, it’s not like anything is owed to you. Say bye to verroq@gmail.com
        verroq 6y ago
        Not sure what your point is because that’s happened to people and they have no recourse.
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        That being the status quo doesn’t make it acceptable?
    - ipsum2 6y ago
      Spamming the white hat security bug program won't get him an answer, because he's not reporting a security flaw.
      - hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming I don't understand how he is 'spamming'.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  Kinda depends on the specifics of the issue. "I can't login." Send password reset, new account owner says thanks, all good. Resolved.
- heyoni 6y ago
  That could be completely made up. He could just be saying this to stir outrage at facebook and that’s why the tickets are being closed. There’s really no evidence of anything at all.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    Then we would like an answer from FB about what occurred. The handwaving away about "nothing to see here" up and down this thread isn't a satisfactory resolution to the issue at hand. Someone alleges their IG was stolen and they allege that FB is batting away tickets about the issue. It would be nice to see FB respond to this. The urgency is compounded by the fact that Amazon had it's own little insider's ring of people providing "extra" services to people for a price.
- itronitron 6y ago
  It's possible that the new owner is notified when an issue is submitted and is able to mark the issue as resolved, or IG notes that someone is using the account and assumes there is no longer a problem.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Because the process for that is automated. It sends you an email to see if you own the account and then asks people on your friends list to verify. That's how it works on Facebook. So if you have full control, you will pass these tests.
simonw 6y ago
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.
- bredren 6y ago
  This reminds me of the federal indictment against consultants bribing amazon employees. If Instagram account takeover favors can occur, how much do they cost?
- anonymfus 6y ago
  It's easy, but remember that it is not a policy team who will decide what to say publicly, but PR team, which in Facebook's case has a sociopathic/capitalist culture of putting profits above everything, and so they will decide whether confirming it in either way will generate more negative news about that event than leaving it ambiguous.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  It can be incredibly difficult to get that traction - I know Patrick Grey of Risky Business has mentioned in passing that he's occasionally helped local-to-him small businesses who have been locked out of their Instagram accounts, because it's basically impossible to get assistance except through well-connected folks.
stefan_ 6y ago
I assume there is no evidence except an account full of pictures of the guy? Maybe the employee claim is wrong, who knows, but determining who owns the account should be trivial. And frankly, given what we know about how the Twitter "hack" went down (rate limits? sign offs? resetting 2FA? impersonating accounts?!) it is fully believable.
serjester 6y ago
Agreed. Is anyone really going to risk their cushy FAANG job to give their buddy a cool handle? Possible, but seems far fetched.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I doubt the low level customer service is a cushy FAANG job. Probably all contractors as well.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The lower-level jobs aren't as "cushy"; I don't see an engineer doing this but I can definitely see a junior in a lower-level customer service or similar administrative role do this.
- objclxt 6y ago
  I have seen this happen firsthand on several occasions at several companies, and it’s a well documented risk vector. You see it for things like username takeovers, and also ad account reactivations. Typically it is not the people with cushy jobs, but those working for vendor companies (moderation, customer support, etc) who have little investment in the company, are barely making minimum wage, and are more than happy to flip a few switches in the dashboard for a few thousand (or less).
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  > Is anyone really going to risk their cushy FAANG job to give their buddy a cool handle? Possible, but seems far fetched. Given the kind of ethically vacuous tech-bro who might join FB in 2020? Not _that_ far-fetched.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Ethically vacuous doesn't mean stupid though, and I doubt they will jeopardize a lucrative career for a quick buck or bragging rights in front of their friends.
    - 6y ago
WORLD_ENDS_SOON 6y ago
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.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Users here will believe any conspiracy theory so that's not really a high bar. I'm serious. There was that massive 2000 comment thread the other month about some big company doing something evil and then it turned out they didn't do it. Everyone who was right and informed in the original thread was greyed out by users here.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Maybe that’s because 90% of the time it turns out the company did do it? I’d be interested in knowing what thread that was though.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - jonas21 6y ago
      It seems like most of the high-profile examples lately have either been false or misleading. Just to check, I looked at all posts with over 1000 points in the past couple of months where a big tech company is accused of doing something "evil" to the little guy. They are: -------- 1. Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com (1656 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303 The OP accused GoDaddy of registering a domain for itself after the OP had added it to their cart. It turns out that many people were searching for the same search terms and someone else just happened to register it via GoDaddy on the same day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901 -------- 2. Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store (1313 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275 The OP implied that Google was banning all Fediverse apps with no recourse for the developers. But it turned out that Google was asking developers to block logins to a set of unmoderated instances that are known to be full of hate speech. Some developers refused, but it seems like most did not, and are doing just fine. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keylesspalace.tusky https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keylesspal... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.juggler.subwaytooter https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.juggler.sub... -------- 3. When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited] (1243 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 The original title and tweet said that Apple keeps the 30% cut. The author turned out to be misinformed. https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1288625617873694721 https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1288625617873694721 --------
some1else 6y ago
Here's a screencap of Philip Kaplan's newsletter from 2017 where he claims a friend at Instagram helped him get @DistroKid, which was registered but inactive: https://i.imgur.com/9mNY7lJ.png https://i.imgur.com/9mNY7lJ.png
- daveFNbuck 6y ago
  That's not necessarily evidence of rogue employees being able to steal accounts for their friends. That may just mean that they had a friend at Instagram that helped them trigger the official process to delete an inactive account and give the name to someone who plans to use it.
  - toyg 6y ago
    In practice, it's the same thing: you have no way to know that this is not what happened to @danny, the consequences are the same.
    - daveFNbuck 6y ago
      It's unlikely that this is what happened to @danny, unless their account was inactive.
- tasuki 6y ago
  Similarly, I "took over" https://github.com/tasuki https://github.com/tasuki by simply messaging the customer support. They said it wasn't being used and I could have it.
  - fotta 6y ago
    The difference is that this is a documented GitHub policy [0]. I’ve done the same for a handle that didn’t have any activity in its entire history. AFAIK neither Instagram nor Twitter have similar policies (though I somewhat wish they did). [0] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-policy/github-username-policy#name-squatting-policy https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...
jknz 6y ago
There is some evidence of some kind of takeover though. Searching for site:http://instagram.com/danny http://instagram.com/danny in google, the first result is the following: Danny (@danny) • Instagram photos and videos www.instagram.com › danny 8690 Followers, 134 Following, 100 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Danny (@danny) This is still in Google's cache. The current instagram profile is very different.
- heyoni 6y ago
  That’s...not evidence of a facebook employee being implicated. It’s actually not even evidence that the account even swapped hands!
  - otterley 6y ago
    > It’s actually not even evidence that the account even swapped hands! Do you honestly believe a jury of average people would agree with this proposition? It seems contrary to common sense. Keep in mind that there is a significant difference between what meets the relevancy bar in court, and what is logically probative. See, e.g., https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_401 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_401
  - jknz 6y ago
    The victim is a real person with a PhD thesis that anyone can read. Why would someone jeopardize his reputation by using his real name on some kind of staging of a fake account swap? I kindly disagree with your second sentence.
  - diab0lic 6y ago
    > That’s...not evidence of a facebook employee being implicated. The account messaged and said a facebook employee was involved. It isn't proof, it isn't strong evidence, but it is evidence and an implication that a facebook employee was involved. > It’s actually not even evidence that the account even swapped hands! Similarly the change in account usage pattern isn't proof but it is evidence.
johnnyfaehell 6y ago
Well the difference between "hey my dad works at Xbox and will ban you" and this is this is now past tense. So it would be a case of you getting banned on Xbox and someone going "Yea that was my dad".
oh_sigh 6y ago
You can 2FA on twitter with the Authenticator app. There is no indication that OP was using SMS 2FA, and you would suspect that they would have mentioned that their phone stopped working if in fact they were sim swapped. I agree there is no proof it was an inside job but it seems plausible.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The author's girlfriend had to re-follow the account, which implies the original followers were replaced with Danny's. In the new Danny's screenshot, it shows that he's followed by three other "OG" account names: "blood", "murder", and "dead". Furthermore, the screenshot was taken from another account, otherwise it would have shown as "This account is private" (Try viewing your own Instagram profile while logged in and private). Whoever was viewing it was therefore friends with Danny, 'blood', 'dead', and 'murder'. In other words, someone interested in OG accounts, or one of new Danny's alternate accounts. Finally, it would be truly bizarre if new Danny immediately implicated a friend at Facebook before anyone asked him how he got the account. If this was true, I would suspect new Danny would be going to great lengths to hide the fact, rather than trying to hand the excuse out before anyone even asks. This guy just stole someone's Instagram account. He's hardly a credible source. I wouldn't rush to conclude that a Facebook employee did this. It sounds like the kind of excuse someone would give to pretend to be coming from a position of internal power rather than appearing to be the result of a hack.
- jeremymcanally 6y ago
  It doesn't surprise me at all, actually. These idiots brag about this to friends constantly and try to make new connections inside the companies to exploit. I have a very short Twitter that people try to take over constantly, and by virtue of being on the platform early, I've accrued a few "OG" accounts for various projects or whatever. When someone stole one of my accounts that I didn't use anymore by having their friend take it over, I had my friend look into it and they reversed it. The account jacking idiot then messaged me trying to get me to put them in touch with my friend so they could try to help them get other accounts and bragged about how he was just going to take some of my other accounts that he somehow knew belonged to me despite there being no link to one another outside of what would be Twitter-internal data. It was the most brazenly ridiculous thing I've ever encountered, but I'm assuming it's an ignorant kid who doesn't realize the possible consequences or a really dumb adult. So, I can totally believe the idiot would just blurt out how he got it because that gives him clout amongst his miscreant "OG account" friends.
tigershark 6y ago
I think he would have noticed if his phone network was dead by now.

by ipsum2 6y ago

gsich 6y ago

That depends if the Authenticator was used or normal SMS messages.

maps7 6y ago

If that was the case why would FB be marking the issue as resolved?

paxys 6y ago
Because there's no proof of any malicious activity. It could very well be that the guy Tweeting is trying to take over the account.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ipsum2 6y ago
I don't know, but it sounds like the issue was resolved (correctly or incorrectly) the first time, so the user started filing a ton of issues, which were automatically marked as duplicate. Now he's spamming the white hat security form (https://twitter.com/dannyjhall/status/1310231761444581385 https://twitter.com/dannyjhall/status/1310231761444581385), which is not likely to get him a response.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  “Spamming?” If repeated complaints about an issue the company won’t resolve is what we call spam now, I’m speechless.
  - verroq 6y ago
    He is a “free” user, what duty does Facebook owe him?
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      Are we talking legal duty or “not being an asshole” duty? I’d argue it’s at least the latter, where the case should be pretty clear.
    - mumblerino 6y ago
      Ah yes sure you don’t pay Google a dime, so don’t you worry if you lose your account tomorrow, it’s not like anything is owed to you. Say bye to verroq@gmail.com
      - verroq 6y ago
        Not sure what your point is because that’s happened to people and they have no recourse.
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        That being the status quo doesn’t make it acceptable?
  - ipsum2 6y ago
    Spamming the white hat security bug program won't get him an answer, because he's not reporting a security flaw.
    - hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming I don't understand how he is 'spamming'.
tedunangst 6y ago
Kinda depends on the specifics of the issue. "I can't login." Send password reset, new account owner says thanks, all good. Resolved.
heyoni 6y ago
That could be completely made up. He could just be saying this to stir outrage at facebook and that’s why the tickets are being closed. There’s really no evidence of anything at all.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Then we would like an answer from FB about what occurred. The handwaving away about "nothing to see here" up and down this thread isn't a satisfactory resolution to the issue at hand. Someone alleges their IG was stolen and they allege that FB is batting away tickets about the issue. It would be nice to see FB respond to this. The urgency is compounded by the fact that Amazon had it's own little insider's ring of people providing "extra" services to people for a price.
itronitron 6y ago
It's possible that the new owner is notified when an issue is submitted and is able to mark the issue as resolved, or IG notes that someone is using the account and assumes there is no longer a problem.
renewiltord 6y ago
Because the process for that is automated. It sends you an email to see if you own the account and then asks people on your friends list to verify. That's how it works on Facebook. So if you have full control, you will pass these tests.

simonw 6y ago

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.

bredren 6y ago
This reminds me of the federal indictment against consultants bribing amazon employees. If Instagram account takeover favors can occur, how much do they cost?
anonymfus 6y ago
It's easy, but remember that it is not a policy team who will decide what to say publicly, but PR team, which in Facebook's case has a sociopathic/capitalist culture of putting profits above everything, and so they will decide whether confirming it in either way will generate more negative news about that event than leaving it ambiguous.
rodgerd 6y ago
It can be incredibly difficult to get that traction - I know Patrick Grey of Risky Business has mentioned in passing that he's occasionally helped local-to-him small businesses who have been locked out of their Instagram accounts, because it's basically impossible to get assistance except through well-connected folks.

stefan_ 6y ago

I assume there is no evidence except an account full of pictures of the guy? Maybe the employee claim is wrong, who knows, but determining who owns the account should be trivial. And frankly, given what we know about how the Twitter "hack" went down (rate limits? sign offs? resetting 2FA? impersonating accounts?!) it is fully believable.

serjester 6y ago

Agreed. Is anyone really going to risk their cushy FAANG job to give their buddy a cool handle? Possible, but seems far fetched.

marcinzm 6y ago
I doubt the low level customer service is a cushy FAANG job. Probably all contractors as well.
Nextgrid 6y ago
The lower-level jobs aren't as "cushy"; I don't see an engineer doing this but I can definitely see a junior in a lower-level customer service or similar administrative role do this.
objclxt 6y ago
I have seen this happen firsthand on several occasions at several companies, and it’s a well documented risk vector. You see it for things like username takeovers, and also ad account reactivations. Typically it is not the people with cushy jobs, but those working for vendor companies (moderation, customer support, etc) who have little investment in the company, are barely making minimum wage, and are more than happy to flip a few switches in the dashboard for a few thousand (or less).
SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
> Is anyone really going to risk their cushy FAANG job to give their buddy a cool handle? Possible, but seems far fetched. Given the kind of ethically vacuous tech-bro who might join FB in 2020? Not _that_ far-fetched.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Ethically vacuous doesn't mean stupid though, and I doubt they will jeopardize a lucrative career for a quick buck or bragging rights in front of their friends.
  - 6y ago

WORLD_ENDS_SOON 6y ago

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.

renewiltord 6y ago
Users here will believe any conspiracy theory so that's not really a high bar. I'm serious. There was that massive 2000 comment thread the other month about some big company doing something evil and then it turned out they didn't do it. Everyone who was right and informed in the original thread was greyed out by users here.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Maybe that’s because 90% of the time it turns out the company did do it? I’d be interested in knowing what thread that was though.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonas21 6y ago
    It seems like most of the high-profile examples lately have either been false or misleading. Just to check, I looked at all posts with over 1000 points in the past couple of months where a big tech company is accused of doing something "evil" to the little guy. They are: -------- 1. Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com (1656 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303 The OP accused GoDaddy of registering a domain for itself after the OP had added it to their cart. It turns out that many people were searching for the same search terms and someone else just happened to register it via GoDaddy on the same day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901 -------- 2. Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store (1313 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275 The OP implied that Google was banning all Fediverse apps with no recourse for the developers. But it turned out that Google was asking developers to block logins to a set of unmoderated instances that are known to be full of hate speech. Some developers refused, but it seems like most did not, and are doing just fine. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keylesspalace.tusky https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keylesspal... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.juggler.subwaytooter https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.juggler.sub... -------- 3. When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited] (1243 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23987584 The original title and tweet said that Apple keeps the 30% cut. The author turned out to be misinformed. https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1288625617873694721 https://twitter.com/twolivesleft/status/1288625617873694721 --------

some1else 6y ago

Here's a screencap of Philip Kaplan's newsletter from 2017 where he claims a friend at Instagram helped him get @DistroKid, which was registered but inactive: https://i.imgur.com/9mNY7lJ.png https://i.imgur.com/9mNY7lJ.png

daveFNbuck 6y ago
That's not necessarily evidence of rogue employees being able to steal accounts for their friends. That may just mean that they had a friend at Instagram that helped them trigger the official process to delete an inactive account and give the name to someone who plans to use it.
- toyg 6y ago
  In practice, it's the same thing: you have no way to know that this is not what happened to @danny, the consequences are the same.
  - daveFNbuck 6y ago
    It's unlikely that this is what happened to @danny, unless their account was inactive.
tasuki 6y ago
Similarly, I "took over" https://github.com/tasuki https://github.com/tasuki by simply messaging the customer support. They said it wasn't being used and I could have it.
- fotta 6y ago
  The difference is that this is a documented GitHub policy [0]. I’ve done the same for a handle that didn’t have any activity in its entire history. AFAIK neither Instagram nor Twitter have similar policies (though I somewhat wish they did). [0] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-policy/github-username-policy#name-squatting-policy https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

jknz 6y ago

There is some evidence of some kind of takeover though. Searching for site:http://instagram.com/danny http://instagram.com/danny in google, the first result is the following: Danny (@danny) • Instagram photos and videos www.instagram.com › danny 8690 Followers, 134 Following, 100 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Danny (@danny) This is still in Google's cache. The current instagram profile is very different.

heyoni 6y ago
That’s...not evidence of a facebook employee being implicated. It’s actually not even evidence that the account even swapped hands!
- otterley 6y ago
  > It’s actually not even evidence that the account even swapped hands! Do you honestly believe a jury of average people would agree with this proposition? It seems contrary to common sense. Keep in mind that there is a significant difference between what meets the relevancy bar in court, and what is logically probative. See, e.g., https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_401 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_401
- jknz 6y ago
  The victim is a real person with a PhD thesis that anyone can read. Why would someone jeopardize his reputation by using his real name on some kind of staging of a fake account swap? I kindly disagree with your second sentence.
- diab0lic 6y ago
  > That’s...not evidence of a facebook employee being implicated. The account messaged and said a facebook employee was involved. It isn't proof, it isn't strong evidence, but it is evidence and an implication that a facebook employee was involved. > It’s actually not even evidence that the account even swapped hands! Similarly the change in account usage pattern isn't proof but it is evidence.

johnnyfaehell 6y ago

Well the difference between "hey my dad works at Xbox and will ban you" and this is this is now past tense. So it would be a case of you getting banned on Xbox and someone going "Yea that was my dad".

oh_sigh 6y ago

You can 2FA on twitter with the Authenticator app. There is no indication that OP was using SMS 2FA, and you would suspect that they would have mentioned that their phone stopped working if in fact they were sim swapped. I agree there is no proof it was an inside job but it seems plausible.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

The author's girlfriend had to re-follow the account, which implies the original followers were replaced with Danny's. In the new Danny's screenshot, it shows that he's followed by three other "OG" account names: "blood", "murder", and "dead". Furthermore, the screenshot was taken from another account, otherwise it would have shown as "This account is private" (Try viewing your own Instagram profile while logged in and private). Whoever was viewing it was therefore friends with Danny, 'blood', 'dead', and 'murder'. In other words, someone interested in OG accounts, or one of new Danny's alternate accounts. Finally, it would be truly bizarre if new Danny immediately implicated a friend at Facebook before anyone asked him how he got the account. If this was true, I would suspect new Danny would be going to great lengths to hide the fact, rather than trying to hand the excuse out before anyone even asks. This guy just stole someone's Instagram account. He's hardly a credible source. I wouldn't rush to conclude that a Facebook employee did this. It sounds like the kind of excuse someone would give to pretend to be coming from a position of internal power rather than appearing to be the result of a hack.

jeremymcanally 6y ago
It doesn't surprise me at all, actually. These idiots brag about this to friends constantly and try to make new connections inside the companies to exploit. I have a very short Twitter that people try to take over constantly, and by virtue of being on the platform early, I've accrued a few "OG" accounts for various projects or whatever. When someone stole one of my accounts that I didn't use anymore by having their friend take it over, I had my friend look into it and they reversed it. The account jacking idiot then messaged me trying to get me to put them in touch with my friend so they could try to help them get other accounts and bragged about how he was just going to take some of my other accounts that he somehow knew belonged to me despite there being no link to one another outside of what would be Twitter-internal data. It was the most brazenly ridiculous thing I've ever encountered, but I'm assuming it's an ignorant kid who doesn't realize the possible consequences or a really dumb adult. So, I can totally believe the idiot would just blurt out how he got it because that gives him clout amongst his miscreant "OG account" friends.

tigershark 6y ago

I think he would have noticed if his phone network was dead by now.