An Instagram Lesson For All

Whew!  My plight has been resolved.  Instagram took down my page that was hacked.  My heartfelt gratitude to those who helped by reporting the impersonation of my page and the images which were not mine.  What a fiasco, but I am ever grateful to those who took the time to help me and to those of you who reached out via my blog.

It’s a good lesson to learn that even though there are those out there in cyberland who choose to hack, to impersonate and to live on the dark side; there are also those who have your back, make the effort to do good and to help when needed.  For this, I am ever grateful.

Some tips I read on the Instagram site if you are ever in this predicament, and can’t log into your account for whatever reason, are:

Tell your friends to report it as “this profile is pretending to be someone” and not as pornography or spam.

• “The appropriate way to report an account is go to the person’s account, then hit the ellipse or the three dots on the upper right hand corner.
• Next, click “I believe this violates the community guidelines;” then “report account;” then “this profile is pretending to be someone else;” and then hit “someone I know.”
• If you are a person, tell your friends to do this. BUT – if you are representing an organization, give instructions to the right people within your company to report the account.”

I researched through the Instagram site, trying desperately to contact them to tell them that my page was hacked, password and email changed and there was no way I could log in to remove the hacked photos from my account.  I learned that there is a two step authentication process by which those on Instagram can protect their pages which I highly recommend you do if you are on Instagram.  I will not be using their services anymore, but I will say that am grateful that within a day of complaints by me and some of my followers, the page was deleted and will never be resurrected by me.

I know a lot of people who use Instagram for family photos, etc.  In my research there were tons of people who had been hacked as I had and they had to jump through hoops to authenticate themselves to Instagram and some of them lost their photos entirely.  It’s an epidemic now in this cyberworld that there are people who choose to arbitrarily hack into other people’s accounts and not just with Instagram, but I’ve heard with Facebook and other social media.

Be wary, be careful, and take precautions dear friends.  It can be a dangerous world out there.  I hope this never happens to you and I am grateful that the crisis is now averted for me.  But perhaps in sharing my story, you will be more vigilant so that you don’t experience this unseen, disturbing violation of your social media account.

Shine On!

xo