Three years ago, we were temporarily locked out of our instagram account for reasons undisclosed. However, despite failing to make contact with any human being at instagram, our access was restored.
Earlier today, it became apparent that our account was hacked. We are locked out again, but this time, I suspect it is for good.
We've tried reaching out to instagram, and we've explored options for restoring access, but whoever has assumed control of our page seems to have been fairly rigorous in their attempts to keep us out.
Concerned about the harm that person might do, with our name and our credibility, we've asked friends to report the account so hopefully enough flags are raised.
It was initially quite devastating, as we thought about the amount of time we had invested in the account over the last three to four years.
When we were locked out before, we experimented with other social media apps and marketing tools, but despite some of the grievances we have had with instagram, it has proved to be the most convenient and effective.
Even this blog, here, is a tool that we don't give the proper attention to.
Over 950 posts, 2026 followers (although we suspect a couple may have been spammers) and many happy customers are seemingly lost to the ether now.
The fact that our account was hacked (with some skill and cunning) in the service of something as tedious and unimaginative as a cryptocurrency grift is rather depressing.
However, if we're honest, the algorithms have not seemed to have been serving us well over the last year. In 2021, with almost half the followers, our post engagement was easily double what it has been recently.
We're not quite ready to give up on the platform, so we'll start again. This time around, perhaps things will play out a bit differently and we'll reach a slightly new audience.
We do want to maintain contact with those who expressed the most interest before; there were interactions that we want to continue, and to give up on instagram feels a little like abandonment.
Our page was the only dedicated forum for Canyoning in Korea, on instagram, and beyond our guided tours, we had also used it to help peers network and arrange trips.
For reasons like this, and more, there is a lot of motivation for getting restarted. Despite the invasion and theft, we'll try to stay positive.
Hope to see you there, again, soon!
Update 17:35
The hacked account does seem to have been taken down.
We'll try to see if it can be recovered, but we're not going to get too invested in that possibility.
Instagram or no, we're still going to be canyoning!
Update 18-June-22 15:47
So, the hacked account has been back up for 2 days...
We've tried a few things, but because the hacker has blocked us, we can't post warnings to anyone of the new, scamming content.
It is very hard to actually make contact with a human at instagram. Considering how easy it would be to prove that the account rightfully belongs to us, and it shouldn't technically be difficult to return control, this inability to connect is especially frustrating.
We have a new instagram page, now, but we're going to allow it to grow slowly - rather than investing the same time and energy that we did previously.
Our largest concern is that the hacker has 2000 accounts which he can reach out to via direct messenger - 2000 accounts that we have no effective way to warn.
It seems very apparent that the account was hacked, but people don't always pay much attention to their feeds. A screenshot shared with us, by a friend, showed that one of the new posts (a financial chart; very obviously not something we'd share) has over 30 likes. Those people not scrutinizing the posts are potentially vulnerable to harmful messages from our page.
Hopefully we can resolve this soon.
Ideally, we'd get the account back. But that seems unlikely.
Otherwise, we just want the page down. Then we can put it out of mind - and move ahead without this distraction.