And? How much are you going to pay for a script that lets you steal inactive Instagram accounts that you will then go on to sell on a grey market? You're not going to do it yourself, because when (not if) it's discovered how this happened, there will be an investigation, and you'll get caught, lose all the money you "earned" in legal fees, and (bypassing a login screen is textbook, right-in-the-strike-zone CFAA) spend months in prison. So you have to sell it to someone. How much are they paying? How many buyers are there for it? How long do they get to assume the script will keep working? The more people you sell it to, the less time each of them have to run it. And: when they get caught, if you've sold to several people, there's a significant chance you're going to get caught.
the hijacking happens on the grey market because there is no reliable escrow agent and its already against the terms of service of IG
you don't need this script to find the accounts, you would use it when you promised to buy or sell an account and hack the phone number based 2-factor
to either assume control of the account without paying, or steal it back
but if you did want to scale this up to stealing normal user's accounts, stealing instagram accounts is merely a factor of changing the email address twice and then the account name.
after which the original owner knows their account got stolen but has no record of the account lol, because they don't know the account ID, just the old username and email address which is super gone and doesn't match any record. you won't get caught primarily because there are too many barriers of entry for someone to take it seriously enough to investigate.
Thanks for chiming in, the people on hackernews often want an easily google-able peer reviewed study on some stuff thats private for a reason
Its lazy to derail a discussion with “I didnt see it so SOURCE! Ha Im so right about everything your whole argument is invalid”
instead of
“oh thats a problem what can we do about that” especially when unsubstantiated nonsense isn't really a big problem here, while completely misunderstanding problems and solutions is what this forum gets laughed at about
This isn't answering any of the questions I asked, except that you think "you won't get caught because nobody will take this seriously enough to investigate", which is true if nobody makes more than a couple thousand dollars doing this, but not true if someone manages to make, like, $100,000 doing it.
> but not true if someone manages to make, like, $100,000 doing it.
narrator: people make $100,000 doing it.
Your question? This one?
> How much are you going to pay for a script that lets you steal inactive Instagram accounts that you will then go on to sell on a grey market? You're
But this isn't what anybody is doing. Nobody is trying to do that. Nobody is lurking in the bushes for inactive accounts. People hijack ANY account they please, which usually has some nice level of attention on it. Assuming control of account properly leaves no trace of the account to the original owner. NOBODY would be able to distinguish a stolen account to a newly organically built meme account for sale. You nor an investigator would know if the current seller is the hacker too. Its impossible to answer your question for these reasons.
I'll try to answer it: I'd probably pay $500 because I don't really keep track of the dollar value of my cryptocurrency balances on Empire Market or Nightmare, since code and documents aren't illegal goods and Department of Justice has said time and time again that they aren't going after consumers even if my OPSEC was broken (I use Monero exclusively, not transparent cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin). I just kind of buy anything that looks somewhat interesting and somewhat exclusive. Otherwise I'd really just wonder why the code isn't on github already for me to just clone and move on.
You'd pay $500 for it. Let's round that up to $1000, double what you said you'd pay for it. And: I'll buy that you could get that much for it! Now, this researcher got a $30k bounty from Facebook, so, to beat that on the black market, he'd have to sell a tool --- knowing full well what it'd be used for, and facing the daunting task of trying to talk a jury out of that obvious fact --- to thirty one people who will then do god knows what the fuck with it, all of which he will be an accomplice to.
This is a bad business plan. To see why, just Google "Marcus Hutchins".
Marcus Hutchins took a plea deal so we'll never know. The first article on the Washington Post was about why the charges such as "conspiracy to violate the CFAA" are a stretch. With that in mind, there basically isn't someone to Google, and no case law. Are we even still talking about the now-patched brute force guessing of a 2-factor code, because now you're gearing up to dissect a legal review that will fail any equivalency and has no case law whatsoever. Classic internet discussion.
Now back to the practical reality: You wouldn't get caught selling it on darknet. You would just post in the forum and 31 people would buy it for $1,000 in a few days. Have you even used darknet? Have you ever used Monero? Have you ever done an obligatory cleaning of bitcoin just because you dont know what THEY did with it? You are trying to support your position so hard by making all of this stuff sound so unfeasible when its exactly what goes on every day.
You would sell it for a premium JUST BECAUSE the earliest clients will do "god knows what the fuck with it". That would be the literal sales pitch! Accomplice? Ehhh maaaaybe but not really a concern.
and even with all that, you're missing how much the customers would make. these are the ones incurring the most liability and they use clearnet and still wouldn't face real consequences.
you're missing how the exploiter would do it themselves before considering selling copies of it, which is what I was alluding to. the exploiter would already understand how to control and monetize instagram accounts and make several hundred thousand dollars, or millions over time. A 500k follower meme account with 3% engagement could make $1,000 per week from promos if you worked at it, and be sold for a revenue multiple. Take a bunch of those. Rinse, repeat.
you're inventing viable business plans trying to argue with me, its wild.
