Image: Cathryn Virginia
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
People often get locked out of their online accounts. Sometimes they may have lost access to the email address registered to the account. Or perhaps the site or social network’s process for getting back in is so convoluted or ineffective, like Instagram’s, that people pay thousands of dollars for help from semi-professionals.
This market of third-party account recovery services is a seemingly ballooning industry, with some legitimate players and likely some scams too. And now they’re fighting over potential clients who tweet about their hacked or otherwise inaccessible accounts, using bots to automatically reply to people on Twitter pointing people to their recovery services.
Motherboard used a Twitter account with no followers to tweet “help my account got hacked.” Straight away multiple, apparently automated, accounts replied.
“Dm for immediately recovery,” one wrote in reply to the tweet.
“Reach out [username] on Instagram he is honest and reliable also fast in recovery of hacked, suspended,deleted,band [banned],and disabled account.I think he is the best,” another wrote in their reply.
Do you know anything else about these account recovery services? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email
