Maddison Fox makes a good living by selling nude photos and videos of herself online. She gains most of her customers via Instagram, where she has more than 300,000 followers. Here she posts semi-clothed images of herself—so as not to get blocked by the app’s anti-nudity rules—to entice customers to buy a subscription to her OnlyFans page, where her more risqué content resides. Fox says she can earn at least $600,000 a year.
In 2022, Fox fell victim to a type of scam that has been little reported but is pervasive on Instagram and aimed at mid-level influencers. Upon opening her Instagram, Fox found an official security message stating she needed to confirm her phone number. She entered her details, but soon afterward her account was suspended. This was serious. Instagram acts as an essential shop front for Fox’s content.
Fox had another account with a few old photos on it, a backup profile for emergencies just like this. However, when she accessed it, she found a message from another Instagram user offering to restore her suspended account for $1,000. Fox was flummoxed by how quickly the message had appeared. “How did [they] know I was taken down before I even knew I was taken down?” she says. She refused and instead went through Instagram’s official identification process to try to restore her original profile, which she succeeded in doing.
The following day she received another message from the same user claiming that they had restored the account, not Instagram, and that it would cost her $600. Fox declined to pay, only to be warned that her account would be suspended once more. “Within a click of him saying that—boom—it had gone again,” says Fox, and soon her backup profile was suspended, too. A scammer had gotten her in his sights.
Each time Fox managed to retrieve her two accounts by following Instagram’s protocols, they were quickly suspended again. She thought the scammer must work for Instagram or have “some kind of backdoor coding knowledge.” Several months later Fox was targeted by another scammer, who asked for $1,500 to restore her account. But this one also proposed an alternative: she could post an Instagram story recommending him as a restorer of suspended accounts. That request, in which victims are blackmailed into advertising the very scammers that scammed them—thus legitimizing them and sending new victims to them—appears to be typical.
Fox began to hear rumors in the industry about other OnlyFans models being targeted. Some had paid scammers up to $10,000 to retrieve their Instagram accounts. Emilie Rae, who has 125,000 followers, followed a scammer account after one of her friends promoted it in an Instagram story. “Within an hour my account had been suspended,” Rae says. “It’s our livelihood—my job involves social media, and it’s taken years to build up multiple accounts.” Last year, payments to creators on OnlyFans surged almost 20 percent to $6.63 billion.
Victims are blackmailed into recommending the very scammers that scammed them.
Scams like these aren’t specific to OnlyFans models. Smith Mehta, assistant professor at the Center for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, says “mid-tier” influencers represent the best target to hackers. “First, they don’t have the support staff; second, they more likely won’t get Instagram’s support in dealing with this,” says Mehta. “So the question is about targeting a particular class of influencers, not someone who’s at the very top end but also not someone who’s not earning their bread and butter on Instagram.”
Meta, which owns Instagram, recently removed 63,000 Instagram accounts linked to a sextortion scam, based in Nigeria, in which scammers were soliciting intimate photos from users and then blackmailing them. But the company’s action came only after an international outcry. Mehta believes there’s a difference between retroactively dealing with an issue and creating a system that doesn’t allow for such scams in the first place. When asked why Meta won’t act, Mehta was unequivocal. “They don’t have the staff to do it, and they won’t be doing it.
“If you read the news reports, every time you will see the last line: ‘We contacted the Meta representatives for comment, and they were unavailable,’” says Mehta. “Every time some conspiracy occurs, they ask the person who points it out … to take the burden of providing evidence, and then they express surprise and say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know this existed.’ Well, this is your platform. If it’s your house, you take care of it.”
Instagram’s intransigence caused Fox to investigate the criminals herself. She went undercover at Hack Forums, a Web site where would-be scammers share tips and tutorials on how to carry out all manner of fraud. Fox found hackers talking quite openly about the particular scam that had affected her. She discovered that her scammer had flooded her account with enough fake followers to somehow trigger Instagram’s automatic suspension mechanism.
Other scams targeting influencers involve creating a profile that duplicates that of the intended target—with the same posts and photos—but with an even larger number of followers (most of them fake). The scammers then report the victim’s original account as being an impersonator of the fake account. When Air Mail contacted Meta for comment about Fox’s experience, one of the hacker’s accounts was removed, but Meta representatives declined to comment.
Fox now wants to help inform those who might be affected, and she hopes Meta can adopt a more comprehensive approach to scammers on the platform. “We’re talking about people who rely on their Instagram to make money to live.... And people don’t understand the scam. They think, ‘Oh, I’ve been banned.’ No, you haven’t been banned; you’ve been scammed!”
Nick Thompson is a London-based freelance writer
