Our Grief Probate Journey Instagram Account has been Hacked!!!

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On Friday night (13th May 2022) our official Grief Probate Journey Instagram account was hacked. We fell into a trap of responding to a message sent to us by who we thought was one of our friends in our grief community. Because we thought it was them we were interacting with them. By the time we realised something was wrong it was too late. We have contacted the person to let them know we were hacked and that they have also been hacked. We provided them with the link to their hacked account.

This is the fake account page:

We have been trying endlessly since then to get it back. We have contacted Instagram doing the following:

• Filling in an impersonation form
• Submitting a verification video to confirm the fake account

Emailed the following:

• Instagram security
• Instagram Phishing
• Instagram support (which gives an instant auto-reply)
• Instagram press

We even messaged: the founder of Instagram with no joy.

We have reported the page and Instagram said they will not remove it because it more than likely does not breach community guidelines.

We have security settings in place, but within seconds of getting hacked they had changed our:

• Email
• Phone number
• Two-step authentication

All without our consent. We replied to each of these changes through Instagram and haven’t had any response.

We are mortified that we fell for what they did and that this has happened. It feels like another loss. That page is a dedication to our Dad and our journey. We have built up a community, we had that page for three years. And just like that, it’s gone, and it feels there is nothing we can do about it despite all our best efforts.

We feel like a part of us is missing. We want this to stop so that they cannot possibly do this to our entire list of followers.

We are in the process of contacting our followers to let them know what has happened (via email and our Facebook page) but felt we needed to do this to announce it more broadly and hopefully Instagram will acknowledge what has happened.

They have now started posting fake stories and contacting our followers, we have over 1,000. This is not okay. We feel mortified and want Instagram to help us get it back. We say the word followers, but we see them as our friends, we are a community of grievers that have our platforms to try and help others who are also grieving or may know someone who is grieving.

One of our followers made a YouTube video of the interaction, thankfully those who we have contacted realised it was a scam and have reported the page. Others have kindly offered to post it on their page to let people know. For all of these things, we are grateful.

We know these things unfortunately happen, but it doesn’t make it any better when it happens to you especially as we could have possibly avoided this from happening. The damage has been done and we hope that we can fix it.

Out of desperation, we are now trying Facebook for Instagram as they are linked.

If you are able to report this page, we would be extremely thankful and grateful.

In the meantime, we will continue in our efforts for Instagram to acknowledge and give us our account back.

Thanks, and blessings,

Grief Probate Journey