HACKER Q&A
📣 throwmuhsan

Meta can't recover account if it was faceless


Recently my Instagram account with around 21k followers was hacked and the details were changed.

I received the email and reported this as not being me. Meta asked for a video of myself to verify me but my account has been faceless so to no avail it didn't pass review. I've put in over 6 years into the account and I'm not sure how to recover it.

Meta needs to do a better job of flagging such changes to an account, it's really easy to flag the account has been hijacked tbh.

Are there any meta employees which could possibly help? My contact information is in my bio.

The account in question was @qtr.republic and it's been renamed to @mortosx_lrmlbp2f.


  👤 muzani Accepted Answer ✓
Lots of people with faces also lose their account despite these verification processes. I have yet to hear of a valid person get their account back. The clear pattern is always that some strange numbers log into an account from a different location, the account renames, rebrands, removes all past images, and then someone else who has logged in from a common location comes in and complains about it. This should be flagged as account theft.

Meta doesn't care enough to make their processes clear. One could argue transparency helps the thieves steal accounts, but right now, it's the thieves who know all the processes and the humans don't.

I guess make a new account or use it to switch to another platform like Cara.


👤 romanhn
Unfortunately, asking Meta employees is not going to help - they're not allowed to. I've written about it previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40433730