This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. To subscribe to Court Watch, click here.
Meta is suing a scammer who allegedly and prolifically extorted people by banning and unbanning their Instagram accounts.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, is against Idriss Qibaa, who ran the “Unlocked 4 Life” extortion scheme, according to an earlier criminal complaint filed by prosecutors. Qibaa, a self-described “professional when it comes to the banning and unbanning of Instagram accounts,” admitted on Adam 22’s No Jumper podcast in January 2024 that he had over 200 people who pay him monthly to maintain access to their accounts, and claimed he made more than $600,000 a month with this scheme. On the podcast episode, Adam mentioned that celebrities have fallen victim to similar extortion crimes, and Qibaa responded that they’re “getting extorted.”
Samantha Cole
Part of the “Unlocked 4 Life” extortion scheme included threatening to murder victims if they didn’t cooperate, according to the criminal complaint. A federal grand jury in the District of Nevada indicted Qibaa in August 2024 in a case that’s ongoing, charging him with two counts of violating interstate communications law for sending messages threatening to injure or kill two victims. The indictment goes into detail about the harassment Qibaa allegedly doled out against people who didn’t comply with his scheme, including sending hundreds or thousands of text messages, racial slurs, messages threatening to kill them, and photos of a man with a bloodied face. “Here’s the last guy who came to take photos/came near my home,” that text said. In one case, he threatened to “blast out” a victim’s social security number and demanded she pay him $20,000 to stop harassing her, according to court documents.
Meta’s new complaint accuses Qibaa of selling “unauthorized Instagram services including (a) the ability to disable user accounts; (b) user account reinstatement services intended to circumvent enforcement actions taken by Meta in response to users who violated the Instagram Terms of Use (‘Terms’) and other rules that govern access to and use of Instagram, including Instagram’s Community Standards (collectively, ‘Instagram Terms and Policies’); and (c) fake engagement services intended to artificially inflate followers on Instagram user accounts, among other things.” The complaint also claims that Qibaa was running the same grift on X, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Telegram.
In February 2024, Meta sent Qibaa a cease-and-desist letter, revoked his licenses to access Facebook and Instagram, and disabled his accounts, according to the complaint. But Qibaa made new Instagram accounts to get around the bans, Meta alleges.
Meta’s complaint is a look into how easy it is to manipulate its own reporting and moderation features. The company says Qibaa got people’s Instagram accounts banned by simply submitting fake reports claiming they were violating the platform’s terms. When Qibaa submitted the misleading reports, Meta alleges, Instagram disabled the account on the same day, and in some cases, reinstated it on the same day, too.
