Motherboard has learned that a scammer has managed to lock the Instagram account of Adam Mosseri, CEO of the platform, by pretending to be dead.
Mosseri's account was closed through Instagram's memorialization feature, where users can inform the company of the death of the account holder, and accordingly the platform bans anyone from logging into the account, and stops the ability to make any changes to content that has already been uploaded.
I find it absurd that Instagram would allow such things to happen on their platform in the first place, the scammer who claimed responsibility for locking Mosseri's account, who used the nom de guerre Syenrai, told Motherboard in an online chat. Ban on the platform and report to Instagram so they can put a stop to this, that's the dark side of Instagram."
Senray provided screenshots of the emails he sent to Instagram to stop the account using the memorialization feature, and Instagram requested a death certificate, obituary, or news article that included the full name of the deceased person. To target the Instagram manager's account, Senray said they created a fake obituary online.
Instagram confirmed that Mosseri's account was locked last September, and that the company quickly resolved the problem. But Senray said others who were targeted were unable to recover their accounts so quickly.
The news highlights how scammers continue to take advantage of relatively obscure features on Instagram and other social networks to harass victims, such as deliberately kicking people off the site.
For lesser-known accounts, such as those with less than a million followers and which are not verified, Senray said they obtained recent obituaries of any deceased person online and used that as evidence to close their account.
I have a simple way like finding an obituary online for someone who died recently, after that, I make a request to memorialize the victim's account using the random obituary I found, and it takes 1-2 days for the request to be processed."
"As long as the obituary is recent (during the same week), the memorialization feature will be activated, which is 98% successful," Senray said.
He explained that most of the accounts they ban or memorialize are quickly brought back through requests from customers who pay Instagram to recover their accounts. And Motherboard previously mentioned that Instagram provides its services for express support for less than $ 60.
"For regular users who are memorialized, some people take days or even weeks to come back," he added.
An Instagram spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that “Like other online services, Instagram has online forms to help people report suspicious activity or to let us know about the death of a friend or family member. Unfortunately, some people are abusing these models, so we hire investigators and cybersecurity specialists to discover fraudsters' tactics so we can improve them and make them increasingly difficult."
He explained that teams reviewing memorialization requests look at things like matching the photo, name, and date of birth in an obituary submitted with the account in question.