MARTIN DE RUYTER/STUFF
Jamie Nicoll is happy to have access to his Instagram account again, but worries that it might not be so easy for other users to do the same. “There should be a better way,” he says.
Kiwi mountainbiker Jamie Nicoll’s Instagram account has finally been restored, after three months of going in circles with automated recovery systems.
Nicoll was contacted last week by a fellow mountainbiking enthusiast, working for Nelson MP Rachel Boyack, who saw an article about his predicament in the Nelson Mail.
The staff member put him in touch with a senior manager who works at Meta’s Singapore office.
Once he made that connection, gaining access to his hacked handle was straightforward and painless.
READ MORE:
* Auckland tenant took $7k worth of landlord’s furniture, sold it on Facebook
* Sort Your Life Out NZ: Family was ‘at wit’s end’ in cluttered home
* Peter Thiel helped build big tech, now he wants to tear it all down
“There were like no questions, I didn’t have to send a photo or a piece of paper with a code, it was just like ‘here’s your login link’. I just logged in and my name was back to how it was,” he said.
“I was really happy after that. I was like, ‘Oh my god it feels sad to be so happy about your Instagram account’, but you apply a lot of energy to creating it and then I’ve applied a lot of energy to try to get it back and it’s just so difficult. Then to actually have this happen it’s just like ‘oh wow’.”
As a professional mountainbiker, Nicoll has sponsors such as Santa Cruz Bicycles and Ground Effect Clothing who relied on him for exposure via his Instagram account, which he had spent 10 years developing a following of around 10,000.
While Nicoll was really grateful to have had the assistance that he received, others might not be so lucky.
“It’s a cool story that the government links you up, but it’s sad that you have to go to that level to get anyone to sort out what is actually a really simple problem.
“There would be people that are less well known in their circles of sport or whatever and there wouldn’t really be the same story there. It should be easier, there should be a better way.”
Nicoll said the Meta contact was going to look into the accounts of other Kiwi athletes who had been going through the same thing.
The scam was perpetuated by messages sent to friends and followers saying that the Instagrammer had bought a new phone and was trying to set up their Instagram, and needed to receive a code to log in.
Nicoll riding his Santa Cruz mountain bike. PHOTO Tony Hutchenson
They then sent off the message: “Are you able to receive a code for me?”
“They’re actually sitting there at the gateway to your Instagram trying to log in and it says to reset your password, you need to receive this code,” Nicoll said.
Many of his friends or followers who the scammers contacted thought it straight up sounded “dodgy”, so fired off their own security questions, like ‘When did we last catch up?’ or ‘What is Jamie building at his house?’.
Nicoll said he’d definitively be more aware of messages like these and would be more careful online in the future, especially when busy with other things.
The help he received was a good reminder of the impact you can have by just making a small effort to go out of your way and that could “really change someone else’s life, even though you might be busy with your emails”.
Nelson MP Rachel Boyack said it was obviously a “very frustrating situation” for Nicoll. It was also a relatable one, since “most people would have had an experience of being locked out of an account or forgetting their password and not being able to access their information or account.”
Boyack said that whenever she and other MPs spoke to tech company representatives, they encouraged them to make it easier for people to access support from overseas-based tech companies.
“Ideally, people shouldn’t have to go to their local MP in this type of situation, but my office is available to help people with government departments, NGOs and other agencies, and we were happy to help in this instance.”
