Like any other morning, transgender content creator Lana Madison; she woke up and grabbed her phone. He checked her income from OnlyFans, where she ranked in the top 0.06 percent of earners, and then her Instagram direct messages. Since Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, often deletes artist pages, Lana maintained two accounts where she posted photos of herself dressed in short skirts. A man messaged her homepage – he was always a man – saying he could help her get her account back if she lost it. She ignored it. Because it offered a solution to a problem it did'there is no; Lana wondered.
The next day, Lana woke up and her main account was gone. The same man contacted her on her second page, offering to gain access to her lost page. The bonus: $2,000.
“I felt like he'd taken me out, the same way a robber stakes out a house before breaking into a house,” Lana says. “And I wish he had broken into my house instead of stealing my Instagram. If someone robs my house, I have insurance. If someone takes my social media pages, I lose tons of future revenue. You cannot secure your Instagram account as an OnlyFans creator. This was a nightmare and is a nightmare that the creators of OnlyFans continue to live with.”
I am well aware of these problems. For over a decade, I have been working as one of the top MILFs in the adult industry. Time and time again I have seen my friends and I lose our social media accounts only to have a scammer message us offering our accounts back in exchange for a bonus. Worst of all, these scams often work, and once they do, adult artists are targeted again and again. Many in the adult industry have avoided discussing this problem publicly, but with so little information available about who these scammers are and how they operate, we need to raise the alarm so that Meta and other tech behemoths can investigate . (Meta declined to comment for this article.)
Many artists face this problem several times a year. For example, Lana didn't pay because this was the second time she was targeted by scammers. Months earlier, a different man contacted her after Meta took down her account. She paid him and he somehow reversed Meta's decision. She then discussed the scam with those close to her and three of her friends had dealt with similar scammers. Some got their accounts back, some didn't. Lana was sick of it.
Fortunately, for reasons Lana still doesn't understand, Meta reversed their decision to close her account. Meta never texted Lana with an explanation, but he regained access to her Instagram. Her friends were not all so lucky. Some paid scam artists receive nothing in return. “It's happened to three of my friends,” Lana says. “They're all trans.”
When Lana told me this story, I wasn't surprised. I have been in similar situations myself. My trans colleagues, however, seem to face account deletions and scammers more than anyone in the adult industry. Although there is no data on this, I hear a lot more about trans girls facing discrimination on social media than I do about my cis performing peers. Social media companies take down their accounts. Trolls target them daily, harassing them and stalking their family members. The list of digital drama goes on and on, and for whatever reason—probably because they're mentioned more often—tech platforms seem to erase trans performers more than cis performers. In my experience working with trans girls, they deal with a lot more stalkers, harassers and overall digital trolls. The internet punishes them for being trans, and it fits a sinister pattern: More deletions equal more messages from scammers, and these scams are popping up more and more with the rise of artificial intelligence. They raise many important questions about both sex work and the state of major technology platforms.
To understand these questions, you need to know how fraud works. Here's what usually happens: One of my social media accounts goes down. Suddenly – in a way that seems too quick to be a coincidence, although it's not clear exactly how an account can be removed – a stranger contacts me via DM or email on Twitter. They promise to get my account back if I pay a price. Sometimes, they claim to have an insider on Meta.
Performer Abigail Mac has received these messages after losing her account. “They're people who work on Instagram,” says Mac. “[They’re] blackmailing them and just stealing their money.”
In her most recent test, Mac says, Meta crashed her account and received a message from a scammer offering to recover the account for $15,000. They swore the account would disappear forever if he didn't pay them in 24 hours. She replied that she would get her account back herself.
“Then they asked me what my budget was,” says Mac. “Every day [they] it would make some money. It's such a scam.”
The scariest scenario is when someone texts you saying, “Hey, save my stuff in case you lose your account.” Then, whoopsie doodle, there you go, your account is gone. Now when I get these messages my stomach drops.
The worst part is when I have paid these people, it often works. They recovered my account. I'm grateful for that, but it raises questions about how these people operate and what they know, not just about sex worker Instagram accounts, but everyone. How do they get the bills back? Where do they work when they are not recovering sex worker accounts? How do they contact Meta to fix the problem? And why does your account get deleted again and again when you pay these people?
“Once you pay, they know you're going to pay and you're going to keep paying,” says Mac.
The girls have paid up to $20,000 and have not gotten their accounts back. It is plausible that these scam artists message a girl, mention her account, and then contact her via another avenue, such as Twitter or email. But there's no way to know for sure. For all the talk about the dangers of social media, from teenage anorexia rates to smartphone addiction, the public pays little attention to the harms sex workers face on these sites. (Unless a porn star fucks a president, you're not going to see her on his cover Wall Street Journal.) We need Meta to investigate the problem and find out what went wrong before more people get scammed.
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/sex-workers-instagram-scams-meta-1235040461/
