When Irene Gee received a direct message on Instagram from her chihuahua’s groomer last month claiming a bitcoin mining opportunity earned him over $13,000 from a mere $700 investment, she was eager to get on board. After all, she knew him, he presented photos of the deposits to his bank account as proof — and, anecdotally, she’d heard countless stories about people making money on crypto.
Users at the center of such scams said requests for help from Instagram went largely unaddressed and efforts to regain control of their accounts failed, even after repeated pleas to the social media platform. It took Gee a month to regain control of her compromised account, but only after it was used to target her friends and family for weeks. In hopes of getting her money back, Gee fulfilled a list of demands from the hacker — including filming a video of herself promoting the scheme.
She desperately contacted Instagram “every five minutes” to stop the takeover, but her attempts too were unsuccessful. It took Zhukovski two months to regain access to her Instagram account — and not by using the platform’s Help Center, but after her cousin solicited assistance from a friend who happened to work at Meta.