The Great Instagram Runaround
Your IG account got hacked? Good luck with that, bucko!
Let me get one thing straight right from the start: I don’t like Instagram and the fake-it-till-you-fake-it culture it has enabled. From the μinfluencer that brags about their kid’s birth while pushing wheatgrass supplements from the clinic’s bed an hour after a c-section, to the latest mega-popular sensation giving life advice right out of elementary school, it reeks of dishonesty and plastic. In fact, it annoys me so much that I sat down and made an app that I consider to be the anti-Insta.
And yet I use it. Not a lot, but I do. My typography blog is not gonna promote itself, after all, and since typography is such a visual medium, it’d be pretty stupid of me not to post there.
Until very recently, my dislike for Insta was content-related. However, something happened that put the platform itself on my shitlist too.
The Haxx0ring
You see, a friend’s account was hacked. I don’t know how, but she suddenly found herself locked out of her account.
“Fine,” you say. “Why didn’t she simply request a password change?”
Well, because she couldn’t. The highjacker was sophisticated enough to change her phone number into one of their own and removed her email from her account. Any 6-digit codes sent by IG were ending up on the highjacker’s phone, and when she entered her email she would get a “user not found” error.
Now, I’m an Android developer and I guess that makes me a “computer guy” by default, so my friend turned to me hoping that I could help her retrieve her account.
“Piece of cake,” I said and cracked my fingers, before embarking on a journey that’d make the Odyssey itself seem like a quick trip to the convenience store.
Into the Labyrinth
Since the normal account retrieval methods wouldn’t work, I decided to investigate further and see if I could reach IG support. Armed with my friend’s handle, I decided to tap on “Get help logging in”
The next screen gave me two choices: I could send an SMS (which would end up on the highjacker’s phone) or log in with Facebook. I knew that my friend’s IG account wasn’t tied to a FB one, but I went for it anyway.
Big Fucking Mistake.
Doing that created a new IG account, which used the email that was removed by the hacker from my friend’s original IG account. So now we had a new Instagram account using the email tied to the original IG account.
Pissed off, I decided to tap on the “Need more help?” option, which gave me a pop-up telling me that the device I was using to perform the account retrieval was “not recognized” and that I should “use a device I’ve logged in with in the past and try again.”
So let me get this straight, IG: you allow users to remove the email from their accounts from any device at all, but you insist that they use a device that they used in the past to attempt and reclaim their account?
And while we’re on the matter, why even let users remove their email address from their account without requiring them to use a new one? How are they supposed to do basic account administration without an email address tied to their account?
Why even let users remove their email address from their account without requiring them to use a new one?
Left with no choice until I got my hands on my friend’s device, I decided to tap on Go to Help Center and, oh boy.
The Help Center, Or Where Hope Goes to Die
First, let me tell you about the cruelest joke I’ve ever seen being played by an app on its users.
When the phone number was changed, and the email removed by the highjacker, an email was sent to the original email account.
I know what you’re thinking right now. “Cool, just click the ‘secure your account’ link, and Bob’s your uncle.”
But, naturally, Bob’s not your uncle unless Bob’s a very angry, spiteful uncle who farts a lot at family gatherings. Because you see, dear reader, the link takes you to the IG Help Center, which I’ll be calling the IG Hell Center from now on.
If you’ve never used the IG Hell Center, please hold on to that precious childlike innocence for as long as you can.
If you want to imagine what a physical manifestation of the Hell Center would look like, imagine that you’re in the middle of a vast white room, and there are black doors dotting the walls in the distance. So you pick a random door and you start moving towards it. As soon as you reach it, you open it and go inside, expecting to speak to some kind of manager. Imagine your surprise when you pop out of another door, stepping into the same white room you were in before. So you keep doing this a few times until you see another black dot in the distance, only this dot is different. This dot is moving towards you, and as it does you get goosebumps, but curiosity gets the best of you and you decide to wait it out. As it moves closer and closer you realize that it’s a man with a huge strap-on penis. The man is Franz Kafka and he’s after your ass.
Anyway, let’s get back on track.
Clearly, when you get an email telling you that your phone number has been changed, and you’re not the one that’s made the change, there’s cause for concern. I’d love to know who decided that taking you to a help page where you can attempt to contact support is the best course of action. Clicking on that link should let you revert the change immediately, Instagram. What the hell is wrong with you?
That’s like receiving a message telling you that your house’s on fire which ends with a “Put fire out” button, only when you click on the button you’re taken to a webpage where you can purchase sprinklers. It’s borderline idiotic.
More Hilarious Hijinks in Pretend Support Land
Have I mentioned video selfies yet?
After clicking through a bunch of links and answering that you have photos of yourself in your account, IG will let you submit a video selfie of yourself which they will supposedly use to confirm your identity. Hooray, right? Well, no.
My friend submitted selfie after selfie of herself doing some peculiar neck-straining exercises as instructed on-screen by the IG app, and she always received a “video selfie received, it’s pending review, you can expect to hear back within 1 business day” message in her email. Her selfies were always rejected, with no good reason ever given, even though it’s pretty obvious that she’s the same person depicted in her photos and stories.
Having decided that recovery was pretty much impossible using the standard methods, my friend took to filling any available support form she could find.
She filled the one meant for deactivated accounts.
She filled the one for impersonation accounts.
She filled the one meant for memorializing a deceased person’s account, but stopped dead (get it?) in her tracks when she was asked for her own death certificate.
Nothing.
This wasn’t going to work.
I’m Gonna Tell Your Dad
With IG failing to respond to any of the submitted forms and selfies, we decided that it was time for a more proactive stance. My friend created a page on Facebook, and then an ad.
This would let us contact Facebook Ads support directly through chat, a method that had apparently proven effective for people in a similar situation.
We did indeed manage to get ahold of some real humans using this method, but most of them would either offer links to the Hell Center or apologize for not being able to do much more than whisper soft words of consolation in our ears and pat us on the back.
My friend finally managed to get someone to call her on the phone, and that support rep assured her that her case had been forwarded to the IG Internal team, who would investigate the issue and then get back to her within 24–48 business hours.
The way I see it is, they either meant one business hour per day, or the Instagram offices are on goddamn Venus* because it’s been more than a week and no one has responded yet.
Plot Twist!
This article was going to end on a low note, but my friend got an email from IG telling her that she’d be able to get back into her account on the day I published this.
I have no idea what worked. If I had to guess, I’d imagine that it must have been the Facebook Ads support rep that my friend managed to get on the phone.
Even though she managed to regain control of her account, I’m still flabbergasted by the near-impossibility of getting an actual human to assist you out when your IG account gets hacked. And as I gather, having your IG account stolen is not a rare occurrence. The fact that we had to
- have a Facebook account
- create and run an ad on FB
- contact FB Ads support and make our case
- still wait for more than a week to see results
for an issue that originated on Instagram is absolutely insane, considering the size of the platform. It’s only natural that with a bigger platform there’s going to be a bigger support load, but hire more support reps, IG. It’s not like you’re strapped for cash.
*One Venus day corresponds to 116 Earth days. That’s the joke.
Antonis is founder @ looxie.app and an author of horror and sci-fi novels. He also runs thedailytypographic.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
