Marcel Winatschek

Ten Dollars

Instagram got hacked in 2015 and six million people’s contact information got stolen and immediately packaged for sale on the dark web. Someone looked at it and thought, here’s a business. Not even to sell the whole thing - just to let people query it. Ten dollars and you could find anyone by their email or phone number.

They found out because Selena Gomez’s account went down and that was newsworthy enough to trigger investigation. Of course it took a celebrity getting hit for Instagram to admit something was wrong. They spent days insisting it was only high-profile accounts, only the famous people with special protection, before conceding that yeah, it was everyone. The lie outlasted the initial panic.

The passwords stayed encrypted, at least - that part worked. But everything else got extracted and sold. Names, emails, phone numbers, all the scaffolding that connects you to the rest of the internet. Someone built a database and charged ten dollars a search. Ten dollars to find anyone.