Facebook (Shutterstock photo)
About 25 employees at Meta (formerly Facebook) were fired in the last year for what some defined as innocent attempts to help family members and acquaintances.
According to conversations with employees and documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the company is conducting a hunt for employees – both in Meta itself and in external service providers – who use access to the company’s internal systems to sell access to accounts. All the fired employees are accused of taking money – sometimes thousands of dollars – in exchange for resetting user accounts on Facebook and Instagram, sometimes for their original owners who were blocked for various reasons, and sometimes for crooks who wanted to take over accounts with huge numbers of followers in order to sell them to parties who used them to spread various messages .
The system that created the incentive for this is known within the company as “oops” – short for “Online Operations” in English. This is a sort of emergency mechanism for associates, intended to help their friends and has existed since the dawn of Meta. Since the company does not have customer service, anyone who has a company where he works can ask him, if necessary, to fill out a special request on his behalf to reset an account – if it is about changing the email address linked to the account to the extent that the hacker took over it and redirected the emails to himself to prevent recovery, and if it is about changing the password In case the email to which the password reset was sent is no longer accessible. Employees only need to fill in the account name, the email address to which a recovery should be sent, and for whom they are performing the reset.
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But according to the report, many employees took advantage of this ability not to help family and friends, but to rake in profits on the side. Employees received bribes of thousands of dollars from various parties to reset accounts. In some cases it was desperate users who lost access to accounts through which all their connections were concentrated, but in other cases it was fraudsters who paid to “hijack” celebrity accounts in order to lure the many fans into falling for one or another scheme, or in an attempt to sell the accounts back to their original owners for a ransom .
The documents obtained by the Journal showed that while in 2017 Meta employees performed 22,000 account recoveries using Oops, in 2020 the number increased to 50,270. An entire industry of developers has developed around this ability, who have also pocketed thousands of dollars to use their connections with meta employees to recover accounts. Even building security guards at an outside company that provided accounts for Facebook enjoyed access to the system, and at least two of them are accused of using it to sell account resets.
Two employees accused of resetting accounts for a fee gave the Journal strange responses: one claimed on the one hand that he had only performed 20 account resets for friends, family members and “people I trusted”, but then contradicted himself and said that, unfortunately, he fell into the trap of shady parties who took advantage of him to take over accounts; And the second, who was accused of charging a payment in Bitcoin in exchange for transferring control over accounts, also claimed that she had performed a total of 20 resets for family members and friends, but one of the people for whom she reset an account and tried to use her to sell account reset services to others ran a campaign against her that created the illusion that she had received payment on resetting accounts.
A Meta spokesperson told the newspaper that “individuals selling inclusive services are always targeting online platforms, including ours, and are adapting their tactics in response to common industry detection methods. We will continue to take appropriate action against those involved in these types of schemes.” He emphasized that even for users who really need an account reset, paying for the procedure is against the rules of use of the social network.
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