18-year-old Blaze Angel Roberts is a talented surfer.
So good in fact that the Sydney-based surfing star has managed to collect 40,000 followers on her Instagram account.
Unfortunately, her popularity also seems to have drawn the unwanted attention of hackers, who successfully tricked her into clicking on a phishing link, and handing over the password to her email account.
Roberts told Nine Network’s “A Current Affair” TV show that the hackers used the compromised email account as a springboard to hijack her Instagram account:
When Ms Roberts regained access to her email, she found photos of the hackers in her sent messages.
When an account has been hacked, Instagram asks users to verify their identity by sending their security team a photo of themselves holding a piece of paper with a handwritten code that they have provided.
In Ms Roberts outbox she could see the hackers following this process. One photo shows a bearded man in a grey t-shirt, the other a strawberry blonde female.
“For some reason Instagram didn’t think it was concerning that three people had sent them different photos,” Ms Roberts told A Current Affair.
Attempts by the young surfer to regain control of her Instagram account have so far fallen on deaf ears at Instagram:
“I kept messaging Instagram with screenshots and photos to try and send them the proof and they kept saying they didn’t have enough proof and they didn’t know what I was talking about.”
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