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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:

• 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-...