Seems like employees can manually escalate accounts into a locked state and my guess is if it remains in that state long enough its easier to claim.

So they frustrate users long enough to eventually give up on constantly reclaiming the account, then they get it for themselves to sell or whatever.

Not just themselves, often it's stolen to order: there's been a few mainstream stories about this and they often mention that paying off Facebook employees is pretty commonplace because the value of these usernames and the low paid customer service representatives are a recipe for bribery.

Interesting, do you have any links to that end?

Just my personal observation. I earned around half a million dollars by running an "autoclaimer" that would automatically register Instagram names as they'd become available. I'd regularly see Instagram employees grabbing names from my portfolio for themselves.

If you could post before / after screenshots showing proof of this theft somewhere - along with the real-world names of these employees -- that might get a lot of eyeballs.

I can understand the company pulling usernames from an automated name squatter... but I wonder if this happens to fully established accounts too?

Well, I tracked the previous UIDs and saw a lot of names that weren't squatted getting released and shortly after ending up with Instagram employees.

E: Oh yeah, there was also the whole "trademarking" thing that was used to steal generic names from active accounts using obviously invalid trademarks. https://www.vice.com/en/article/zma3w4/scammers-fake-tradema...

How do valuable usernames 'become available'? Like the person deletes their account?

People deleting their accounts, or trying to sell their usernames and messing up the transfer.

Wow that's a shitty thing to do

Meh, it's their site. It's just weird that they don't seem to have any controls around this.

Dont hate the player, hate the game.

This is not kind of game that they're forced to play. So hate both.

Should be easy enough to post a list of stolen accounts someplace public.

wait what? how are they not fired, thats got to be against the "community guidelines" (unless of course its for an advertiser or political organisation. )

I assume they aren't emailing Mark Zuckerberg with every account they steal. All it takes is lax internal auditing and a culture where customer service[1] is not valued and this could go on for a very long time.

[1] Ok, this is a little unfair. They do have customer service, but what they don't have is product service, and this guy is just part of the product, not a customer.