11/14/2026

4 FTC steps for taking back a hacked email or social media account

Quartz

Criminals routinely break into other people's email and social media accounts. Hijackers want these accounts for the trust attached to them. A seized account lets a criminal scam the owner's friends and spread malware under a name those friends recognize. The crime costs victims real money as well: the FBI received 5,200 complaints of account takeover fraud in 2025, and victims lost more than $262 million that year, according to FOX6 Milwaukee. Getting an account back is damage control against someone who is still using it, and every hour the hacker keeps access gives them more time to work.

Nearly all the advice on what to do next is written for the person who got hacked. It walks the victim through each fix, as though the cleanup were the victim's job alone. Troy Hunt, a cyber security expert, told ABC News that the burden "should be a shared responsibility." The companies that host these accounts run the login pages, the recovery forms and the security alerts. A victim controls only some parts of the recovery, and each fix works only as well as the one before it. The useful question for anyone who has been locked out is where the process is likely to fail and what to do when it does. Whether the advice is sound matters less.