A user steals and clones 350,000 profiles: what do these accounts have in common?

Impersonation or cloning of accounts on social networks is an increasingly common problem and of which anyone can be a victim, from the influencer on duty to a profile with four followers. This type of malicious practice often occurs on platforms as popular as Instagram, where a single user has cloned and stolen more than 350,000 accounts. All of them have something in common: none of them had been configured as private.

Instagram parent Meta has already taken legal action against that user, named Ekrem Ates. This has been announced by Zuckerberg’s company through a statement published on its website. The technology company has also reported the launch of a tracking program that it has applied to more than 100 cloned Instagram websites.

The affected accounts had not been set to private

Meta has sued the owner of the cloned website called MyStalk, Ekrem Ates, for fraudulently obtaining information from more than 350,000 Instagram accounts through a software automated. These types of sites usually use pages and applications that offer likesfollowers or other types of rewards to users in exchange for their Facebook or Instagram credentials.

Specifically, the company accuses Ekrem Ates of having used a software unauthorized automation to illegally access and collect Instagram user profiles. According to Target, the software of MyStalk used thousands of automated accounts that falsely identified themselves as legitimate users on Instagram connected through the mobile app and from the web.

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Francesc Bracero

In this way, Ates would have stolen the data of more than 350,000 accounts of the social network, along with their publications, photos, stories and profile information. All of them have something in common, and that is that none of them had been configured as private by users.

With the aim of eradicating these fraudulent practices, Meta has launched a tracking program that has been applied to more than 100 websites cloned from Instagram and with which it has managed to reduce this type of website by approximately 90 percent. Zuckerberg’s company has also disabled his accounts, sent a cease and desist letter, and revoked Ates’ access to Meta services.

Second lawsuit in two years

Meta has recalled that in 2020 it already filed a lawsuit against Ensar Sahinturk for carrying out similar actions and collecting data from Instagram users to create another network of cloned websites.

Zuckerberg’s company then alleged that the defendant violated its policy of conditions of use of the service. As a result, the US court found him guilty as charged and he was sentenced to pay more than $200,000. In addition, access to the company’s social networks, Meta and Instagram, was banned.

How to avoid being a victim of identity theft?

Meta has given a series of recommendations aimed at the protection of personal accounts, as well as the information of the users that appear in them.

One of them is to review the privacy settings regularly so that users are aware that they are maintained in accordance with their usage preferences. Another is to know in detail the safety tips on the Facebook and Instagram help pages.

The platform also advises the use of its ‘Privacy Checkup’ function, which allows the user to be guided through privacy and security settings, such as those that regulate who can see and share their content and how they can be tracked on Facebook.

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