Business Brief: Meta's black market problem

Globe and Mail

2 days ago

Good morning. When I heard about a small-business owner locked out of her Meta social-media account, it was a familiar story. She had tried every mechanism available to her, but the social-media giant provided no customer support and gave no indication it was even aware of the problem with her Instagram account.
Soon, I stumbled upon a shadowy network of brokers and Meta employees who profit from helping to get accounts like hers back online. More on her experience, and many others, below. But first:
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Hi, I'm Kathryn Blaze Baum, an investigative reporter with The Globe.
Before I went on maternity leave in early 2023, I received a text in a group chat from a woman I know socially. Her business' Instagram account had been hacked, and she couldn't get Meta Platforms Inc. – the US$1.75-trillion company that owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp – to do anything about it.
But then a friend of hers, who had just been through her own Instagram hacking and customer-support nightmare, made a suggestion: Reach out to a guy named Moe.
This mysterious Moe said he could expedite the recovery of her account. Desperate, she paid him $2,500. Sure enough, she soon regained access to her account – to all the engaged followers and customers she had worked so hard over the years to attract.
I was intrigued, to say the least.
Who was Moe, and how exactly did he get the account back? Why was Moe, some guy who didn't even work for Meta, necessary? To what degree is this a big problem for small business owners, who rely heavily on Meta platforms for sales and growth?
Upon my return to work in the fall of last year, it was the first story I pitched to my editor, Greg McArthur. He, too, was curious where the reporting would lead, as was The Globe's cybersecurity and financial crimes reporter, Alex Posadzki.
Over the next few months, we conducted dozens of interviews and pored over hundreds of pages of court filings across Canada and the United States. The reporting brought into focus a lucrative and global underground economy – one where well-connected brokers collude with Meta insiders willing to abuse an internal mechanism and recover people's accounts for substantial fees.
We spoke with 11 Meta users who lost access to their accounts as a result of hacking or because of purported violations of the company's community standards. Despite their persistence in filling out requests with Meta, not a single user was able to recover their account through formal channels.
Enter the brokers.
Moe is Mohammed Ismail, an Ontario man who, we came to learn, ended up in the crosshairs of Meta's legal team. The company sued Mr. Ismail in 2023 for allegedly offering unauthorized account reinstatement services.
According to the court filing, he was working with Meta insiders who abused an internal mechanism intended to help employees and their friends and family submit expedited account-recovery requests.
But there was more. Meta had gone after other alleged brokers, including one who was a high-school student in rural Ontario when he first drew Meta's attention. He was accused of making at least hundreds of thousands of dollars selling unauthorized account services.
In those cases – and in two others in Nevada – the company wasn't just trying to shut down the alleged brokers. It was also seeking orders to compel them to disclose the identities of their connections within Meta.
We took our questions to Meta. We wanted to know how big the underground economy was and how many Meta personnel had so far been implicated in it. We asked about the company's reputation for having poor user support, about the internal mechanism being abused by its employees and contractors, and about what the company was doing to prevent such misuse.
Meta told us the use and provision of unsanctioned account services violates its policies, and that people who offer such services in partnership with Meta personnel are deploying deceptive practices and exploiting users.
The company didn't provide us with individual answers to the upward of 30 questions we sent over the course of two months. The size and scale of the black market for unauthorized account reinstatement services, then, remains unknown.
One thing, though, is for sure: So long as users are unable to get Meta's help promptly recovering their precious accounts, there will be people looking for ways to capitalize on their desperation – and make money doing what the company won't.
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