Jon from Hertfordshire was leaving the theatre with his wife on Saturday night, when he opened his phone to more messages than usual.
At first, he was confused by concerned Whatsapp messages from friends, until he checked his email and found his Instagram password had been changed.
While not a prolific user of the social media platform – he’s not posted since 2021 – he still uses its messaging service to catch up with friends.
Jon’s wife went onto his account and found that scammers had taken over his account to post fake Oasis tickets on his Instagram ‘grid’ and multiple stories.
One of the posts read: ‘Selling 2 tickets only – Oasis Wembley London. Just a change of plans – no profit, just looking to pass them on.’
Supernova scams: Oasis fans have are losing hundreds to criminals selling fake tickets
Scammers have targeted Oasis fans in recent months. TSB data shows that Oasis fans were more likely to be scammed, recording 78 per cent more cases than Taylor Swift, losing an average of £318.
Unsurprisingly, there was significant interest from Jon’s friends, with the scammers even messaging his close friends asking them to share the posts, which they did, thinking it was him.
Some friends quickly realised the account was not Jon’s – mainly because the scammer had used emojis that Jon does not use – but others were not so quick to catch on.
Sadly, two friends of friends who had seen the post shared contacted Jon’s account and transferred £400 and £300, respectively, for the two tickets.
All the while, Jon was ‘unbelievably stressed’ and unable to access his account, despite flagging the hack to Instagram.
He filled out the necessary forms and did a selfie verification, but found himself going round in circles and unable to get into his account.
Even after flagging that his account had been taken over, the scammers still had access to Jon’s account, posting the same Oasis tickets.
This Is Money contacted Meta two days after Jon’s account was hacked, to ask why he still did not have access.
Meta said it had been in touch with Jon and his account access had been restored and the posts removed, which Jon said he did himself.
Meta also said Jon had not enabled two-factor authentication at the time of the hack.
The issues didn’t end when Jon had access to his account, though. When he logged back into his account, Jon noticed that the two-factor authentication had been linked to the scammers.
While this has since been rectified, Jon could not manually remove the accounts and phone numbers until he had spoken with Meta.
‘It’s such a poor process. [Without your help] I’d still not have access and more people will have lost money,’ Jon said. Meta should have acted more quickly.’
In this instance, what was most troubling for Jon was dealing with all the messages and what he describes as ‘hate’ from Instagram friends, and friends of friends, who had transferred money.
One of the victims spotted the scammer’s post on Jon’s account and checked the profile to check it was definitely connected to her friend.
‘I’m kicking myself now because I should’ve spotted the red flag when they asked for extra money to change the name, after I’d already bank transferred more than £300,’ she said.
‘The alarm bells really rang when the profile vanished and the messages stopped… I feel silly for falling for it.
‘The bank is investigating so I’m hopeful of getting some of the money back, but the lesson is clear: even if a profile looks and sounds like someone you know, it could still have been hacked.
‘Instagram really needs to crack down harder on these kinds of scams.’
Jon is lucky not to have been left out of pocket, but he is reeling from how slow and complicated the process was to have his account back, and its impact on his friends.
This is Money reported earlier in the year of a similar case, although in that instance the scammers were peddling bitcoin. The process to regain control of the account was as equally difficult.
We warned of an uptick in social media hacking and how vital it is to now have two-factor verification set up all on all accounts in a bit to thwart the surge in scams.
A Meta spokesman said: ‘No system is perfect, particularly when it comes to identifying and removing content tied to compromised accounts.
‘In this case, we’ve since helped the user regain access to his account and the scam post has been removed.
‘Scams are an industry-wide issue and while we work hard to stop them, hackers and scammers use increasingly sophisticated methods to exploit others.
‘We have two-factor authentication available to all users which prevents unauthorised access to accounts even if hackers have your password, which we’d strongly recommend is enabled by all users.’
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