4 ms·
> My current theory is there is some employee at Meta that's ultimately stealing the account This happens all the time, there is no recourse. Instagram employe
by FDSGSG 5y ago
> My current theory is there is some employee at Meta that's ultimately stealing the account
This happens all the time, there is no recourse. Instagram employees are constantly taking usernames for themselves.
- tmp_anon_22 5y agoSeems like employees can manually escalate accounts into a locked state and my guess is if it remains in that state long enough its easier to claim. So they frustrate users long enough to eventually give up on constantly reclaiming the account, then they get it for themselves to sell or whatever.
- KaiserPro 5y agowait what? how are they not fired, thats got to be against the "community guidelines" (unless of course its for an advertiser or political organisation. )
- jandrese 5y agoI assume they aren't emailing Mark Zuckerberg with every account they steal. All it takes is lax internal auditing and a culture where customer service[1] is not valued and this could go on for a very long time. [1] Ok, this is a little unfair. They do have customer service, but what they don't have is product service, and this guy is just part of the product, not a customer.
- rich_sasha 5y agoInteresting, do you have any links to that end?
- FDSGSG 5y agoJust my personal observation. I earned around half a million dollars by running an "autoclaimer" that would automatically register Instagram names as they'd become available. I'd regularly see Instagram employees grabbing names from my portfolio for themselves.
- pshc 5y agoI can understand the company pulling usernames from an automated name squatter... but I wonder if this happens to fully established accounts too?
- FDSGSG 5y agoWell, I tracked the previous UIDs and saw a lot of names that weren't squatted getting released and shortly after ending up with Instagram employees. E: Oh yeah, there was also the whole "trademarking" thing that was used to steal generic names from active accounts using obviously invalid trademarks. https://www.vice.com/en/article/zma3w4/scammers-fake-trademarks-steal-instagram-accounts https://www.vice.com/en/article/zma3w4/scammers-fake-tradema...
- Inityx 5y agoWow that's a shitty thing to do
- Rastonbury 5y agoHow do valuable usernames 'become available'? Like the person deletes their account?
- 5y ago
- hurril 5y agoShould be easy enough to post a list of stolen accounts someplace public.
- leftpass 5y agoNot just themselves, often it's stolen to order: there's been a few mainstream stories about this and they often mention that paying off Facebook employees is pretty commonplace because the value of these usernames and the low paid customer service representatives are a recipe for bribery.