Client account got hacked

dollardude16 · September 22, 2018, 1:10pm

hey, guys, I have a client whom I sell followers and likes and recently their account got hacked

they had 80k followers and it was a verified account and he is a celeb from my country.

Now on their old username, it says the link is broken or changed

he is not sharing the login details with me so i cannot check but he is saying that now after logging it is going to this profile

can i please get your help and inputs on this

on exactly what must’ve happned and what can be done

thanks a lot

lazerlight · September 22, 2018, 1:26pm

Instead of old username, do you have a link to one of their posts? That link should still work (if they haven’t deleted the post already, that is) and you will be able to find the new username that these people are using.
If you don’t have old links or they don’t work, then it will be a little hard work - You will need to find someone who follows them and go through their following list to see what the new username is.
The client should have got a series of messages from instagram like this:

Each one of these mails will have a link to reset the changes and recover the account. This would be their best bet at this point. If the hacker is smart, you might have to be very quick in doing it. You will have to recover the account, change the password, change the email, remove the phone number, activate 2 factor authentication and add your own number. If this does not work, then you have no choice but to go through instagram and wait for the process to get the account back.

Looks like these guys have changed this fake account’s email to your client email. Before doing step 3 above, make a fake email ID and change the email ID of the above account to the fake one before trying to recover the old account. Good luck!

dollardude16 · September 22, 2018, 1:51pm

hey the link which i sent is of the new username only

my clients username is different

they have deleted all the posts and changed username and bio and i guest they’ve blocked all 80k followers and followings and are following new people dont know what’s the case

dollardude16 · September 22, 2018, 1:57pm

i have links of old username posts but they’re all removed

lazerlight · September 22, 2018, 2:18pm

Damn, that’s tough. Looks like they’re smart hackers. Did you by any chance use their Instagram number ID for any purpose? That never changes even if you change the username. So if you have that, you can find what their new username is.

Still, Insta would have sent your client the recovery links and those would be the fastest/best bet at the moment. I’m not 100% sure what will be the effect of them changing the username, because I’ve only recovered accounts which still had the original username by the recovery links.

EDIT: Ok, there used to be a method using iconosquare to get the username from the user ID, but looks like it no longer works. So not sure if you can actually do this at the mo.

hvp17 · September 22, 2018, 3:18pm

If you could PM me your client old username I’ll see if he/she is lying to you about the logging in part.

SkinnyGirl · September 22, 2018, 3:44pm

I dont understand really what the client is saying. Lets say your client is Cristiano Ronaldo and his username is then CRISTIANO. When trying to login, he needs to type CRISTIANO and then the password, of course. I have never heard of someone who put in a specific username X and then it showed the profile Y…

If you want, you can send me also the old username, maybe I find something in another database and get back to you asap…

EDIT:

I have just an article about a travel blogger. She got hacked about 12 days ago. Her username was THEADVENTUREBITCH (not kidding! :wink) ) with 57k followers.

She wrote:

I get a ‘changed email’ notification from Instagram. A hacker changed my handle (they changed it to theadventurebitch.q1, so I immediately changed an inactive account I had to ‘theadventurebitch’ so I could at least still hold onto my name)

The hacker did it to ask her for money. After she paid some money, the hacker didnt reply…

#WTF

More about it here:

tswillms · September 22, 2018, 4:35pm

I don’t understand why a hacker would change the username, block all the followers and followings, and then start fresh by following all new people. Seems like a pointless hack. What’s the benefit for the hacker?

lazerlight · September 22, 2018, 6:38pm

Correct, but a lot of people login using their email IDs, and not usernames. And this is what I’d do if I was a hacker too. Once I’d taken control of an account (say X), I would change the account email to mine, change the username and then I would assign that email ID to ANOTHER account Y. So when the victim contacts insta through THEIR email, Insta says, “oh here’s your account Y! What’s the problem?”

I would think it’s the verified tick here, maybe?

dollardude16 · September 22, 2018, 6:53pm

i dont have the Instagram number ID of their account as we never used it for that purpose

dollardude16 · September 22, 2018, 7:58pm

yes maybe because he had a blue tick he got hacked.

We are still trying to figure out what’s the problem.

hvp17 · September 22, 2018, 8:14pm

Alright, I took a look into the account that you gave me.
I can say that your client account and the @fanny_stollar are NOT the same account with just changed username. The unique Instagram ID’s are different, they don’t change even if you change your username.
Your client Instagram ID: 644692303
@fanny_stollar ID: 8221889533
That means your client is 100% lying that he’s getting logged into @fanny_stollar (that would be a MAJOR Instagram bug in that case, which I doubt is in this case).
Your client either got banned or someone deleted their account permanently. (In their settings -> Delete permanently).
I would call Instagram and get this sorted, don’t bother with emailing them (unless you have a few weeks).

Alexnvo · September 23, 2018, 12:44am

@hvp17 is correct. A profile number is given by Insta for each account . nobody can change it. What I understand neither can Insta too. Some one straight up lying

SkinnyGirl · September 23, 2018, 10:04am

Another benefit could be as described in the article above in which has stated she got her acc. hacked and the hacker sent her a message with an offer: "Pay X$ or you dont get your acc. back."
By deleting all pics and changing the username the hacker is proving that he is really in control of the acc. Also he may makes it harder for the audiencer / fanbase to report that there is an issue with the acc. …

@all:

Someone has written a script to get the username by ID. As I am a total noob, I cant verify. Can anyone here have a look at it and if is legit, can you check the User ID:

? That would be great.

Script:

github.com

postaddictme/instagram-php-scraper/blob/master/examples/getAccountById.php

<?php
require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

$account = (new \InstagramScraper\Instagram())->getAccountById('3');

// Available fields
echo "Account info:\n";
echo "Id: {$account->getId()}\n";
echo "Username: {$account->getUsername()}\n";
echo "Full name: {$account->getFullName()}\n";
echo "Biography: {$account->getBiography()}\n";
echo "Profile picture url: {$account->getProfilePicUrl()}\n";
echo "External link: {$account->getExternalUrl()}\n";
echo "Number of published posts: {$account->getMediaCount()}\n";
echo "Number of followers: {$account->getFollowedByCount()}\n";
echo "Number of follows: {$account->getFollowsCount()}\n";
echo "Is private: {$account->isPrivate()}\n";
echo "Is verified: {$account->isVerified()}\n";

SkinnyGirl · October 15, 2018, 9:20pm

Update:
Above we talked about a girl that got her account hacked (After, the hacker asked for money. After she paid some money, the hacker didnt reply…)

These are the news:
She wrote me last week: “Instagram actually responded back to a Denver Post reporter last week.”

After that it took some more days, and Instagram replied to her directly. But these were no good news. She got the message that the account is gone…

BTW, how did she got hacked? She wrote me that several people have reached out to her.

“Other people who have appeared to be hacked by the same hacker, got hacked from a false login page. I believe it was a false ‘collaboration’ email.”

So it seems like some people are very good in “faking” an Instagram login page. So better be aware if you click on a link in a non-IG-email that is redirecting to an IG login page or first to any other website and from there to an IG login page.

Chinmay_Patel · October 31, 2018, 5:55am

Same Thing Happened with my Personal account.
Basically i used personal(self created) hashtags so i searched them on Instagram i found few accounts, second i tag that account from other account so i tried to find that and i found hacked account with different username.

I submitted application to Instagram with that username and they asked me many question like when you started this account, from which you started this account, email address, phone number.

In Two days i got my account back and they also deleted the account of a person who tried to hack my account.

Hacker has almost 200 k + followers at that time.