How I Lost Thousands of Instagram Followers Overnight

I was taking a break from work one evening when a new notification popped up on my Instagram saying that I was signed out of my account. No big deal, I thought, I'll just try again. I typed in my user name and password and I saw something that made my 20-year-old Millennial heart drop: username doesn't exist.

My account was gone. OK, OK, just bear with me for a second, this is actually a bigger deal than you think. I didn't just lose more than 9,000 Instagram followers, I lost an important source of income. Before I took a job at VICE Indonesia, I was something of an Instagram influencer. Coffee companies, international clothing brands, and watch companies would pay me money to feature their products in my photos. One local university even paid me just to like their events on Instagram. That's all I had to do. Pick up my phone, scroll to their post, double tap, and bam, I was Rp 50,000 ($3.76 USD) richer. OK, so many "rich" isn't the right word, but whatever, it was still something I worked hard to achieve.

And then, suddenly, it was all gone. Someone hacked my Instagram and changed the email to their own. This has become a trend in Indonesia. Hackers steal your Instagram account and then either ransom them back or sell the followers to a third party. It's so common right now that it's become the source of popular comic strips online.

I tried to send a message to the new email linked to my (now stolen) account. Turns out that didn't exist either. I spent the rest of the night trying to report the theft to Instagram. They told me I had to send them a photo of my self holding a piece of paper with a handwritten code, my real name, and my username. I sent the photo off and waited.

While I waited, I decided to reach out to some other people who had their Instagram accounts stolen. Karisya Rucitra told me it was an innocuous looking phishing email that started her problems. She got an email that seemed to be from Instagram asking her to log back in and verify her account.

"Not long after that, all my information on Instagram was changed," she said. "My phone number, my email, everything. Maybe it was because I was clumsy or not paying attention. But [I noticed later that] the I in Instagram wasn't an i, it was a lowercase L."

Karisya was still logged in on her phone, so she was able to change it all back and lock the hackers out the same day.

It took Elmar Pradana a lot longer to get his account back. For three months, the travel and lifestyle writer tried to figure out how to get his account back from a Russian hacker. The whole time, he had to live without his main source of income.

"The first month, I looked for friends who've been through this before, but I couldn't find anyone," Elmar said. "The second month, I looked for an Instagram service provider through Kaskus. It didn't work, but I did learn from them that the hacker was from Russia. At the end of the second month, I was able to get in touch with Instagram through their email. Not long afterwards, I got my account back."

Nadin Amizah told me that she lost the most. The 16-year-old singer had more than 50,000 followers when someone hacked her Instagram and her Apple ID. Nadin noticed it when suddenly her photos started to disappear. At first, she was like, whatever, but then it dawned on her that all those followers were probably really useful.

"I remember back then that I was very sick, and I got a notification from Instagram that I had been logged out of my account," she told me. "I wasn't able to think and I was very weak, so I didn't care. I thought those followers were just numbers. But then when I got healthy, I realized they are connections too."

She reached out to someone who promised to get her account back… for a price. Nadin told me she paid millions of rupiah (hundreds of US dollars) to the guy to get her account back. One week later, it was back in her possession. But the guy who charged her all that money to get it back? Turns out he was the hacker who stole it in the first place.

Why are so many hackers targeting Indonesian Instagram users? I was able to get ahold of a former hacker to walk me through the logic. The man, who declined to use his real name, said that it was pretty easy to trick people with a phishing email. They work hard to make sure that the email looks exactly like the ones you normally receive from companies like Instagram.

For some people, it's a way to make money or make a name for themselves. But others just do it out of spite. They want to destroy a rising social media personality's chance at fame, he explained.

"Nowadays, hacking is just for good fun," he said. "Sometimes it's for money, but that's rare. Maybe [you could] hack an Instagram online shop and resell them so the buyer has active followers…

"[But] we [hackers] have CVs and resumes just like anyone else looking for a job. It's so that the people who hire us can see what we did in the past and what we are capable of. But, of course, these are locked up and top secret."

It seems inevitable to me now. If you are making money off your Instagram account, of course, eventually, someone is going to try to take that from you. I was complaining about this to Elmar when he suggested I pay for something I never heard of: social media insurance.

That's right, it's insurance. For your social media.

"It's so important to have social media insurance!" Elmar said. "Especially [today]. The fact is that there are lots of these cases going on lately. Recently I was just told that my friend who made most of his money selling stuff on Instagram got hacked. Now he doesn't know where to sell his stuff at all."

You can follow Iyas Lawrence on Instagram at @iyaslawrence.