Imagine you are the CEO of one of the world’s largest social media platforms, and they lock you out of your account, because they think you’re dead.

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Well that’s what Adam Mosseri the CEO of Meta (or Facebook) had to deal with. Adam was locked out of his account, after a prankster/cybersecurity expert tried to expose just how lax Instagram’s protocol for creating a memorialised account.

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The prankster who goes by the name Syenrai, exploited Instagram’s memorialisation feature, which was meant for surviving relatives and friends of a user to report the death of an Instagram user, and which then would stop anyone from accessing the user’s account. This was mainly done, by showing either a death certificate, a published obituary or a news article as evidence.

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Hackers and scammers often do this to regular, living users to extort them. However, it takes those users days, and sometimes months to get back the access to their accounts. It took Instagram less than a day to reset Mosseri's account and enable him to use the platform.

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Speaking to tech news site Motherboard, Syenrai highlighted that attacking Mosseri’s account wasn’t just for fun, but it was supposed to serve as a lesson. The main objective was  to highlight how lax the company’s verification protocols are, and they need to come up with better solutions.

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Syenrai revealed that scammers often charge people to ban accounts of competitors or target specific individuals, for a fee. He also said that it doesn’t require a lot of convincing to make it happen. He even went on to share the emails exchanged between Instagram and him to get Mosseri’s account memorialised.

He further continued, in 98 percent of cases, any obituary dated the same week as the request for memorialisation is enough to trigger an account memorialised. The shocking thing is, that most of the time, it doesn’t even matter if the obituary doesn’t have a name, which in itself is a red flag. 

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At times, there have been instances when accounts with a completely different name were locked off, and the corresponding death certificates or obituaries were of a different name.

Instagram & Meta clearly need to tighten up the regulations they abide by, and do better. 

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