In early 2021, Marissa Nelums was thrilled to be on the brink of blue-check verification on Instagram. The Chicago-based designer remembers exactly where she was—hopping into a taxi after attending a friend’s wedding in Mexico—when the message came through, informing her that she’d finally received verification. To seal the deal, she just had to log out of her account and then log back in. Once she logged out, however, she suddenly found that she was unable to log in again.
“It immediately dawned on me what had happened,” says Nelums. Without realizing it, she had signed over her account to a hacker based in Africa. Then, the impersonated posts started rolling in: stories encouraging her followers to invest in Bitcoin, a video showing off the Tesla she’d supposedly purchased with her new riches, and interactions with her followers encouraging them to invest as well. Though Nelums acted fast in contacting the platform’s support team, actually regaining control of her account proved to be a much thornier process.
“What I thought would be as simple as emailing Instagram or Facebook and showing some type of proof that it’s my page turned into a much bigger nightmare,” she says.
Though she didn’t know it at the time, Nelums had joined a rising tide of social media users who have been targeted by scammers seeking to co-opt others’ accounts for financial gain. An Instagram creator account is hacked every 10 minutes on average, adding up to more…
