[a_random_canuck]

They do. My wife lost her 10-year-old Instagram account to a well crafted phishing attack against an email she had published…

Instagram/Meta’s customer support is absolutely atrocious and disgraceful on this front. They basically treat my wife like she’s also a spammer and there’s no way to recover the account or undo any of the changes the spammers made.

It’s hilarious how they ask you to “appeal” a ban by clicking a single button without giving any chance to rectify what the spammers did to her account. Of course their automated bots just reject your appeal almost instantly. Shameful.

[qingcharles]

Clicking the appeal button is like a trap to permanently ban your account.

You can get it back by paying off a Meta employee through a site like Swapd. It's either that or get your comment to the front page of HN. Those are the only two customer support channels for Meta or Google.

[crtasm]

Does her email show up on any leaks on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ? I'm wondering if not publishing it would have made any difference to receiving phishing messages.

[chefandy]

Would such an attacker be stymied by this? It seems like automated email harvesting wouldn't be a big time saver for any attack that required a well-crafted anything. I don't know anything about that particular attack, though.

[hoherd]

This gave me "Press F to appeal ban" images.

[dgb23]

This could happen to anyone. You’re tired or thinking of something else, the attack weirdly aligns and you don’t notice it until it’s too late.