“I hacked your Instagram account, I’m sending one hundred euros”

It all started with an innocent message from a contact. “Help me and vote so I can win the prize.” Begoña did not know that this contact had already violated her Instagram profile. With the intention of cooperating, you have opened the link. This way they sneaked into her profile and took control of it. The same group contacted her on Whatsapp. “Normally I don’t text anyone, but I’m sorry for you, so I want to send it back to you. I’m from Africa.” The message came from a Nigerian cellphone. The friendly tone faded within minutes. They asked for the payment of one hundred euros via an iTunes gift card. Not receiving the money, they continued the harassment for a while. Those affected reported what happened to the National Police with little hope. The messages kept coming. “I never heard from you again … do you still need the account or should I just forget it?”

The network also had access to his professional profile on the same social network, although that account managed to retrieve it within days. Meanwhile, his profile has been filled with messages inviting him to invest in cryptocurrencies or “cryptocurrency mining”. His contacts who are aware of the attack warn: “It is not Begoña, you are an imitator and the police are hunting you”. Now, he is waiting for a kind of response from the owner of Instagram that allows him to retrieve his profile, in which more than a thousand photographs have been practically left, a personal hobby.

The proliferation of cyber attacks of all kinds in recent years has made these situations common, “they are everywhere”, warns the victim. In this case, the attack came from a technique of phishing with a false link although there are other possible ways and the police prosecution of these crimes is complicated.