The Hijacking of Instagram KBJR0719

When the Bitcoin pirates abducted my Instagram, I was watching a movie on whales.

Something about how whales are worse than sharks. A documentary. I found it to be unreliable. A shark is a shark. This must be the work of the shark lobbyists, I thought.

As I was creating oceanic conspiracies in my mind, I received a text message from a friend--

“Hey, I think your Instagram got hacked. Also, you still need to Venmo me for that thing with the hot air balloon.”

I’ll tell you about the hot air balloon some other time.

When I went to check on my Instagram, I found that I couldn’t get into my account. I received a message that said “This isn’t your Instagram anymore. Go away and never come back. You are not welcome here. She’s mine now, and you just need to live with this and move on. It’ll be better for all of us if you just walk away. Just walk away, dude. Just. Walk. Away.”

I could not walk away.

My Instagram was mine. I’d had it for years. There were precious photos on there of me eating charcuterie and holding various puppies to my chest as though they were little babies. How could I be expected to surrender all that?

Soon, more text messages came in from friends and a few people I used to work with at a store that sold mountain climbing equipment.

“Hey, I think you’ve been hacked.”

“Hey, are you really trying to sell me Bitcoin?”

“Hey, do you still need my social security number?”

“Hey, why is one of your eyelids bigger than the other?”

“Hey, I just got a weird message from you about NFT’s.”

NFT might as well have meant “I have No F#$%-ing Time to deal with this.”

I was busy watching nature documentaries and checking on the tracking status of the jungle gym I ordered every few minutes.

Upon Googling, “How do I get a stolen Instagram back and can the people who stole it be marched through the town square and pelted with rotten fruit as a warning to any future Bitcoin pirates who might try this?” I was met with some reassuring news.

Instagram--glorious bastion of accountability and consumer privacy advocate, owned by Facebook (sorry, Meta)--has a procedure for this.

You fill out a form.

You take a picture of yourself proving that you are who you say you are.

You send it to Instagram.

They give you your account back.

Huzzah.

I filled out the form.

I took a photo of myself where the lighting was great and my chin looked amazing holding up a piece of paper with my name and Instagram handle.

I sent all that to Instagram.

They responded with an email saying they had sent an email to the email not to the email address they were messaging me on, but to the address that was now currently on file with a password reset link.

When I responded to that email by letting them know that the Bitcoin pirates were savvy enough to change the email address and phone number on file, their response was the shrug emoji followed by the crying emoji followed by the waving hand emoji.

I was on my own.

When I went back to Google, I found that I was not the only one experiencing this issue. In fact, there were numerous stories from influencers with millions of followers all about how their livelihood was taken away by hackers and thieves. Ransom demands were made. Money was sent. Nobody got their account back and Instagram seemed unwilling to do anything about it. Their employees started getting hassled about it on LinkedIn. Their employees went into hiding. Instagram changed its name to Feta. They were then sued by a cheese company. The influencers posted videos of themselves crying and begging to have their accounts returned. They promised if the accounts were returned unharmed, there wouldn’t be any repercussions. At a closed door meeting of the Shark Council, a report was read indicating that the whale propaganda campaign was working and approval numbers for sharks was going through the roof. One of the Bitcoin pirates messaged one of my friends and had the following conversation with her--

Hi pretty lady, you are so sexy!

You are not Kevin.

Yes, I am Kevin. Would you like to buy Bitcoin?

You are not Kevin.

I am Kevin and I love Bitcoin. You are so hot, but you would be hotter with some Bitcoin.

Kevin is gay.

Yes, I am Kevin and I am gay for Bitcoin.

Other friends had their Instagram accounts hacked as the result of handing out information to the hackers who took my account. I felt responsible. I sent them cards apologizing for a crime I didn't commit. I started a support group. We all met on the first of the month in a church basement where we drank lukewarm coffee and sat on uncomfortable chairs. We talked about how many followers we had when we were hacked. We talked about the photos that had gotten the most Likes. We talked about DM’s that would never be answered and follower requests that would never be approved. We talked about the future and how it seemed like there wasn’t going to be any future. Some of us talked about going back to Facebook, but we agreed that we’d rather tie ourselves to a Go-Kart and let it drag us around a family fun center. Someone mentioned that she’d heard some surprising news about how a shiver of sharks had rescued a boat full of orphans.

That was when I learned that a group of sharks is called a shiver.

They say that sometimes you have to kill what you love, especially if what you love has been consumed by hackers and used to harm others by trying to sell them fake money. I began to tell my friends to go ahead and report my profile. The hackers had begun curating it. They were posting about Bitcoin. They were commenting and chatting and they seemed like a much friendlier version of me. They even changed my profile photo to one where I looked really good, and I appreciated them looking out for my brand even though they were pure evil.

I guess even pirates contain multitudes.

Eventually, the account was shut down after being reported by dozens of my friends. That freed up the handle and allowed me to create a new account. I had taken screenshots of some of my favorite photos (all the ones of charcuterie and that blurry one of me winning the Pulitzer Prize), and with that handful of memories, I started back at the beginning.

I was now @KBJR0719 Version 2.0 with two-factor authentication and a Liam Neeson-esque desire to hunt down the terrorists who had made me look like a fool and rain justice down upon them. Unfortunately, the CIA wouldn’t return my calls, so I had to give up that dream and just hope that karma and legislation destroy cryptocurrency altogether one day.

A month after my new account was launched, I was having lunch with a friend at the aquarium when they mentioned that someone had messaged them on Instagram about a great opportunity to invest in a new form of money called SharkBucks.

I looked over at the tank to our left where a Great White was swimming gleefully in a circle holding what looked like an iPhone and taking selfies in front of a fake coral reef.

And suddenly, it all made sense.