Instagram | Media Culpa

Abercrombie & Fitch and Espresso House also hijacked on Instagram

Yesterday I blogged about how SAS, Emirates and SF got their brands hijacked on Instagram. Today I found two new examples of fake accounts that promise to give away gift cards in exchange for email addresses. Hundreds of Swedish Instagram users are currently giving away both email addresses and even mobile numbers on the fake accounts of Abercrombie & Fitch and coffee chain Espresso House.

Fake Abercrombie & Fitch at http://instagram.com/abercrombiesverige. The account bio says: “We are soon opening a store in Sweden! Follow the instructions in the image to get unique offers and gift cards”. The image caption says that the company will give a gift card worth 1,000 SEK to all followers of the account if they add their email address in the comments.

abercrombie instagram

Fake Espresso House at http://instagram.com/espressohouseofficiell. The account bio says: “The first 5,000 that follow and share this account will get a gift card of 100 SEK at Espresso House”.

espresso house instagram

14,000 people fooled by fake SAS Instagram account

The Instagram account SAS Scandinavian, @scandinavianairlines, promised two tickets to New York including 5 stars (sic) hotel to the first 20,000 people that followed the account. The account quickly attracted more than 14,000 followers.

Of course, this was not the official account of the Scandinavian airline, which can be found at @FLYSAS. Instead, the account soon changed name to @s0viknes and it belongs to, it seems, a young Norwegian guy who did this as a prank to get a lot of followers. He boasts: “follow this king who tricked them all”.

Note: I have cropped this photo because it seems the person in the photo was not the person behind the account.

As always, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If SAS would give away 40,000 airline tickets that would cost about 44 million USD. Plus hotel rooms for 40,000 people. That’s just ridiculous. And you would think that the lousy English spelling would reveal that this was not an official account. Please think before you follow and share hoaxes like these.

And for brands, it is always wise to secure the most apparent versions of your brand name on popular social networks. At least that makes it a bit harder for others to use your brand to scam people.

Update: Several similar fake accounts have apparently appeared the last week. Via @AndersEriksson we can see a screen shot from the fake @emirates_dubai here: http://instagram.com/p/Vb9H-VNmYo/

And one account is pretending to be the Swedish cinema chain SF: @sfbioofficial. It says it will hand out 10,000 movie tickets to people who follow the account and add their email address in the comments to an image. More than 6,500 comments can be found so far, most of them include email addresses to teens and kids. And new comments are still being added every second as I blog this. The official account can be found at @SFBIO.

Parents, you need to have a talk with your kids about scams on Instagram. Found via @kingdeborg and @jonatanahlin on Twitter.

sfbio instagram

Update 2: The account @sfbioofficial changed name to @williammkarlsson, then reappeared with the first name with new followers and new images. @williammkarlsson is now gone, hopefully because it got reported as spam. The scam continues and new comments are added every minute. It seems that the account adds a new image now and then to attract new followers and commenters.

Instagram throws out users under the age of 13

Several Swedish bloggers and media report that Instagram users under the age of 13 have had their accounts closed or frozen the last few days. In some cases, users are required by Instagram to provide their age, in other cases they have to prove their age with identification documents. These incidents are occuring at the same time as Instagram’s new User Agreement entered into force, which harmonized with Facebook’s agreement. My own children confirm that this is actually happening right now.

Users that Instagram suspect are under 13 have had their accounts locked and are sent a message that says they are required to send in an image of and ID such as a passport or a school ID (which is unusual in Sweden) to prove their age. Some are also finding that their Facebook accounts are also locked and according to Deeped Niclas Strandh, there are signs that some are locked out of their Facebook accounts, but that the accounts are still live. This means that others could comment on their walls and posts but they are unable to respond themselves.

“My daughter’s Instagram account was locked and got this message, says Björn Sveen to SVT. She is 12 years and 9 months so she can not just send in a picture of her passport to prove that she’s 13, not that I would let her send it a picture with such sensitive information.”

Screen shots of the messages from Instagram and Facebook can be found both on svt.se and Deeped Niclas Strand, see links above.

I have not seen any similar reports outside of Sweden. Do you know of any more cases?

Flickr image via wiccked.

Pink quits Instagram and leaves 12 million followers

When Instagram announced new Terms of Service two days ago, the community of instagrammers reacted with nothing less than outrage. Among other things, users’ photos could appear in ads and the only way to opt out was to delete your account.

Among the more prominent Instagram users that reacted strongly were National Geographic and artist Pink. National Geographic stopped updating its account and posted this image:

The artist Pink went a step further and has actually deleted her entire account. Before she closed her account, she had more than 12 million followers. Now that’s quite a statement.

The flood of negative reactions forced Instagram to some crisis management and the company yesterday issued a clarification intended to respond to the worst criticism. But the damage is possibly already done. Many are reporting increased and renewed interest in Flickr, which just recently launched a new and updated Instagram-like app.

And Starmatic, a similar app that also lets you import your entire Instagram library, has seen a tremendous increase in import requests during the last 12 hours.

I love Instagram and I hope they will keep their promise to not sell user photos, so I won’t quit the service any time soon. But this could serve as a lesson to any major social network. It is not hard to copy the functionality of a social network, they are rarely unique or patented. I could switch entirely to Starmatic tomorrow if I wanted to. What I don’t want to lose is the network connections, there’s the real value. So when a large enough portion of a network decides to abandon a service, things can move pretty quickly. Hopefully Instagram has learned a lesson.

Instagram users to go private for one day in spam protest

Although Instagram has taken some measures to crack down on the increasing problem with spam, users are starting to become tired with the amount of fake accounts and comments about how to get more followers. In a response to the lack of action from Instagram, the community of instagrammers have decided to announce Dec 4 as the day many will turn their profiles to private. This protest is intended to send a message to Instagram that users are fed up with the situation, they just want to be able to share images without having to be approached by spammers.

Under the hashtag #onedaywithoutspam you can see protest images like these:

“Observing a day of protest against all the #spam on Dec. 4 by posting this and setting my profile to Private for 24 hours on that day. Please join in and hopefully #instagram will begin to take more serious steps to address this annoyance that is out of control.”

Whether this will have any effect on the spam problem remains to be seen.

Instagram’s increasing problem with spam

Since Instagram has been predominantly a mobile app, its main advantage has not been that it drives a lot of traffic to other sites. So unlike for example Pinterest, it has been relatively free from spam until now. But the last few weeks, we have seen a major push from spammers that use hashtags to find images to publish spam comments on.

At the moment, I can easily scroll through the photos in my feed and find several spam comments, most seem to be on images that use hashtags. This is what happened in the comments to my latest photo, within a few minutes of posting the hashtags (one has since been deleted):

Comments like these are very easy to find. Here are some more posted on some of my friends’ images and on mine:

It is not very hard to determine that these accounts are completely fake. Many of them have fake followers with names like these:

Others have some 14,000 followers that when you click on them, simply don’t exist.

Users can delete and spam report comments and accounts, but some spammers are so active that there is a need for general spam filters that could automatically filter out comments about sites like “followsta gram” and “ig fame”. Spam is annoying for users and need to be taken care of. After all, there are many of us that love Instagram. Don’t let the spammers spoil our instafun.