I Was Hacked - And I Got My Account Back
Have you ever worked really hard on something? Like really hard…poured your heart and soul into something - worked on it for over a year and watched it grow. And then all of a sudden you blink your eyes and it’s gone? it’s a really hard concept to imagine, and it doesn’t happen often - or so you think. But this just happened to me.
This Memorial Day weekend took a sudden turn for the worst for me. It was Sunday morning, and I was out shooting content with my photographer. We had a lot to shoot, so I hadn’t checked my emails in over 2 hours. Towards the end of the shoot I went to pull up my Instagram to show her something, and it said my account was logged out.
Definitely strange because as you know, your Instagram account is typically always logged in. I tried to log back in, and it was saying my User name wasn’t found. I started to slightly panic.
I looked at my emails and I had three emails from Instagram…One saying my user name had changed, one saying my phone number was removed from my account, and one saying my email was changed. More panic.
I then saw another email: Instagram Hacked. I opened up the email to learn that my Instagram was taken over, and the hackers were demanding money in order for me to gain access back to my own account. I had 2 hours to respond. It had already been 1 hour and 30 minutes.
This sounds like something out of a movie. Now sheer panic started to set in. My eyes welled up with tears, and my photographer grabbed my phone. She took me to a screen where I was able to send an email to Instagram saying that my account was hacked. I got an email back asking me to take a photo of myself holding a code they had sent me on a piece of paper written clearly so that they could match up my face to my account and verify that was me. We did that immediately…and waited.
And waited, and waited, and waited.
Meanwhile, I tried to stall the hackers. They were threatening to delete my content and then sell my name. I was imagining all of my hard work disappearing one follower and one picture at a time. Not to mention all of the videos of Ryker and Ava I have documented on my highlights.
Now some of you might think….what’s the big deal? It’s an Instagram account. Make a new one. It’s not that easy. For some of us, our Instagram accounts have become our brands and our businesses. We work really hard for each follower. We work really hard on our content. It takes years to get recognition and brand awareness. To lose all of that is detrimental and heartbreaking.
I left to go home, shaken and shocked. I didn’t even know what to do. Was this really happening? I walked in the door, saw my husband and broke down. I was flooded with feelings and the tears started flowing. We immediately started reaching out to anyone and everyone asking for help. And I mean everyone. My husband knows a lot of people, but between the two of us, we didn't know one personal contact at Facebook or Instagram.
i reached out to my friends and family. i asked them to post on their stories asking for help. Asking if anyone knew anything. Asking for contacts to FB and IG. Jay went onto Linkdin and started emailing people…people who work in IG tech and security, people who might know people…he even wrote to Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of facebook!
And I started googling. It was amazing how many people this was happening to. This has been going on for years…the same exact scenario. I googled how to get your account back, can you account disappear, what to do if you are hacked, should you pay the hacker. You name it, we looked it up.
Hours passed and passed and passed. I cried, googled, and cried some more. It wasn’t helping that this was a holiday weekend, which only meant more time for the hackers to work on my mental state and threaten my account.
My friend texted me…”Did you click on any links that seemed off recently?”
“No” I answered. Then paused YES I did. A day prior I had gotten an email from the “fashion nova” which is a well known clothing brand. They were asking me if I wanted to collaborate and to click on the link to check out their instagram. I clicked on the link…and I don’t remember what happened, but it didn’t take me to their instagram. Weird I thought.
Then I looked at the email further…Their instagram handle was wrong. Then I looked at the email address. It was a gmail, which was strange. Most companies that reach out have some sort of business email. I wrote back telling them their instagram handle was wrong, and then didn’t stress over it. Although in my subconscious I must have thought it was wrong because I texted my group chat and told them I got this really weird email. To which the response was “yea that is weird.” Again…nothing to really raise a concern.
Well if you ever see emails like this BE CONCERNED! This is called “phishing”. Hackers send out fake collaboration emails to get you to click on the link to break into your account. I am 100% sure this is how I was hacked. So moving forward, please be careful of the emails you open, and the links you click.
As the hours passed, friends here and there started to text me. “I saw your husband’s facebook post, I know someone who works at FB…let me see if they can help!” The problem was, it was Sunday, and Monday people were off. By the end fo the day I had about 4-5 people who had connections at FB reaching out on my behalf.
Sinking into a further depression the hackers were telling me they were starting to delete my content. I’m not gonna lie, that night, we ended up negotiating with the hackers to a lower price, and we paid it through bitcoin. Let me preface this part with I only considered this because another blogger had paid off the hackers and got her account back.
Well I wasn’t so lucky. They took the money, and ghosted. These people who were emailing me incessantly went completely silent.
It was 12 o’clock at night. There was nothing more to do but wait and hope that IG had secured my account before the hackers could cause damage.
I woke up Monday feeling a tiny bit better, and then the tears would fall again. I tried to keep busy, and then I would sit on the couch and think about worst case scenarios. Would I be able to rebuild all that I had lost if I couldn’t get it back? How would people find me?? Is it possible that Instagram didn't have a way to recover people’s accounts?
Tuesday finally came. I was hoping for good news. People were back to work and someone, somewhere had to be able to help me.
Finally, an email came through. Someone was able to send me a code to reset my instagram Easy Peasy. I opened it up, and there it was. Every single photo, every single follower, every single memory was there. Untouched and unscathed.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. It seemed surreal. All of my hard work had been recovered.
Unfortunately, this is not the case for everyone. I have heard of bloggers who have lost everything and had to start over. I’m not quite sure what the circumstances were…one was a dog account who had 22k followers and instagram said they couldn’t help them because the email was changed. Maybe because it was photos of dogs, the person couldn’t be verified as the owner?
Either way I am writing down my steps, so that if this ever happens to you, you have the best shot at recovery.
When you get the email that anything has changed on your account, you can click revert this change if it is wrong. (that didn’t work for me, but try that first)
Go to your login screen, click forgot PW, and then click need more help. This will bring you to a screen to report that your account has been hacked. Once you fill this out Instagram will send you an email with a code to write down on a piece of paper with your Photo to verify it is you before moving on. ***I am hoping at this step Instagram grabs hold of the account so that no damage can take place***
Contact anyone and everyone you know at Facebook. Knowing someone on the inside helps to expedite your case and get your account back faster. I have heard that Instagram gets 100 million to 200 million appeals a day of hacked accounts. I think that this is a numbers game. There are too many people that need help, and probably not enough support to get it all done. The more people you can get to support your cause, the better chances you have.
Don’t give in to the hackers…honestly I wouldn’t even respond to them. I am so angry that I gave them my time and energy, and my money. At one point, they wrote to me that they knew I contacted support, and that I wasn’t going to pay. Does this mean at that point Instagram had taken control of my account? I’m not sure. But I do know the more I talked to them, the more I was sucked into a downward spiral. In the end, they did nothing but steal my money, and ultimately didn’t touch my account or damage. it.
Contact Facebook Ad support. If you have a business account, there is a chat, which is really really hard to find. But you can chat with someone there who can try to help you. Honestly, the person I talked to was COMPLETELY useless…but I have heard of people having luck there.
There are people called “White hat hackers” who hack for your benefit. They charge you a fee…I found ones for $100-up to $1500…who will hack to get your account back for you. I had them in my back pocket as a last resort. But if they were able to do it, I had faith that Instagram could as well. The one “white hacker” who is well known for this is @jaunr325
Try not to lose hope. Something that made me feel better is that Instagram holds your account name for 14 days after it is disabled. Meaning a hacker cannot create a new account with your name in that time frame. It is a security measure to protect our accounts. My feeling is that this is all a numbers game and a who do you know game. With the amount of requests a day instagram gets, I can see how recovering every single account can be time consuming and tedious, but don’t lose hope!
I wish Instagram would speak out more about this. Can a hacker really delete your content and your followers and sell your name? Can they delete your account to a point where it cannot be recovered? If the answer is no, knowing these things would create less stress for those being hacked, and it would weaken the ability for the hacker to pray on our fears of losing our content. If we all knew they couldn’t ultimately destroy our pages, they wouldn’t be able to hold our accounts ransom anymore.
I hope that none of you ever have to go through what I did. It was an invasion of privacy, and an attack. It wasn’t just about my Instagram. It was about a stranger using extortion. It was about someone having the power to mess with my life and my emotions, and tear me down. But one way or another, we all prevail. $210 dollars less, and lots of lessons learned…I’m back, and stronger than before.
<3
P.S.
If you ever go through something like this feel free to reach out. Try to stay positive, as there is hope that good can come out of any dark situation.