The "account recovery expert" — the scam after the hack

Your email or social-media account gets hacked — or you're simply locked out — and you post publicly asking for help. Within minutes, helpful strangers appear in the comments recommending a "recovery agent" or "ethical hacker" who "got my account back in 20 minutes."

The "agent" charges an upfront fee — often in gift cards or crypto — then vanishes, or asks for your login codes "to do the recovery" and steals whatever access you still had. A second version impersonates the platform's official support in messages, threatening account deletion unless you "verify" through their link. Both prey on exactly the moment you're most desperate and least sceptical.

What to do: account recovery happens in exactly one place — the platform's own official recovery page or app. Nobody legitimate charges money or asks for your codes to "get your account back."