UPDATE: Pinterest has deleted the two accounts I reference below but it appears this is happening across many other accounts as well (see the comments). Key take-away: check your followers regularly for anyone you haven’t followed yourself. If you find anything odd let me know in the comments.
I’ll add details here as I investigate more but it looks like Pinterest has been hacked again. This is probably related to the original Pinterest hack I discovered the other day. What appears to be happening is the hack is somehow auto-following Pinterest users for you. I noticed this on my profile just now:
I did not follow either of these women. I might have visted Maria’s page while checking out the original hack, her face looks familiar, but I definitely did not visit Jessica Alba’s page.
If you look at Maria’s profile you can see she has over 84000 followers but 0 pins! The fake Jessica Alba profile shows over 99000 followers and only 4 pins, in Jessica’s case a good % of the followers could be from people mistakenly believeing it’s really her but many were clearly auto follows. Check your followers and let me know in the comments if this has happened to you too.
UPDATE: Maria appears to have been deleted by Pinterest since I published this so you won’t see her on your profile now. The fake Jessica is still there as of now though.
UPDATE 6:12 EST: The fake Jessica has now also been deleted so you won’t see her either.
Having just checked my account i’ve found 4 users that I never followed. What makes it worse – none of them have pinned anything. I’ll be interested to see what else you can find out.
Wow…that’s crazy. Hopefully, the people over at Pin will get this figured out. Hackers are such a pain.
Robert, any chance you remember who they were? I’d love to check them out.
Unfortunately not, Craig. I didn’t think to save their profiles as I just wanted to remove them asap. I wonder if any of them could be found on Zoomsphere? Fairly longwinded but you could check for the users with the highest amount of followers and then click through to look at their profiles?
thanks Robert. I did some quick checking and found quite a few other spam accounts auto following but Pinterest has already deleted them (http://pinterest.com/elisabethcarla/, http://pinterest.com/peter_hawman/, http://pinterest.com/lorasteve/, http://pinterest.com/auroramark/, etc, etc). There are probably many others though so I guess the real advice here is to check your followers regularly for anything suspicious looking.
I have tons of these “fake” followers. Many w/Jessica Alba’s face. My thought is they are hoping you will follow them when you get the following email from Pinterest. I emailed Pinterest the accounts but have yet to see any action or a reply to email about it. And why on earth can’t they create a “block follower” option? Clearly it is desired by users from what I can see on their FAQ pg. Make me want to quit!
Xixi Hu is another one. No matter how many times I click to unfollow her I am automatically following her again in a couple seconds.
My mom is getting tons of fake followers. Like 7-10 a day. Her whole 1st page of followers is filled with fake accounts. They all have Middle Eastern sounding names and they all have the same exact pins. Here are a few
https://pinterest.com/srshohag/
https://pinterest.com/reshadramp/
https://pinterest.com/shimul786/
https://pinterest.com/meherin/
Here’s the ones that I just reported to Pinterest, there may be more, but I was tired!
Pinterest.com/remediosejj……Lorinda Higgs-strange because she has no boards/pins
Pinterest.com/omaricruz……..Omari Cruz-no boards/pins….says something about being from
San Buenaventura…..see below
Pinterest.com/anstonhenceo……,leycharles DAELAN (spelling/caps as written on account)-also from San Buenaventura? Also, their boards are random, each has one pin, and the comments on the pins often do not make any sense when paired with the product in the pin. They don’t make any sense, at all. Just looks like a sock puppet account. Ok-when you click on the pin-they all seem to take you to a site that sells imposter luxury bags.
Pinterest.com/okechurchc……ewinston LYNDON (again, spelling/caps as is?)…they have a few boards and pins…but when you look at what they commented on the pin, it’s very strange, like, there’s a pin of a purse, but the comment says ‘Whats up, amazing pin Make sure to visit our pins, as well (spelling/caps as is). Again, sock puppet account. I think this is related to the name above, there are a lot of bags in their pins.
Pinterest.com/lorntenth657….Jean Lloyd……pins/boards all lead to fake bags.
Pinterest.com/lashonda236……Tania Milosevic…..no boards/pins
Pinterest.com/shaun20w……Lynna Tovias……no boards/pins
Pinterest.com/gretchenlavera….Gretchen Lavera..another from ’San Buenaventura’
Pinterest.com/lesliphebe….Lesli Phebe….her ‘about me’ sounds like a cut and paste with a few revisions, of Gretchen Lavera.
Pinterest.com/poshcupped775…..Violet Powers….nonsensical boards/pins…..seem to be a wedding dress store of some sort, lots of dress
Obviously, something is going on with the ones whose addresses include a different name than the ‘user’, plus some random number. Like they are all employees of some boiler house operation, and that’s how they keep track of their sock puppet accounts….like the employees name is their name, and the number is indicating which sock puppet account it is, like Joesmith20= employee: Joe Snith, and 20=20th sock puppet account that Joe Smith has created.
This whole thing just aggravates me!
More than two days back, when I tried logging to my Pinterest account, I find the error that “Oops! Your account has been deactivated, but your pins are safe and sound.Please contact Support and we’ll get you pinning again soon.”
I tried the Support with no response so far, and when checked the support yesterday to create one more ticket, it says “You have been suspended from this account. You are not allowed to submit requests at this time.” Now I cant even get to the Support.
They never stated any reasons why they suspended my account, and nor did they have the courtesy of giving an explanation to me. Pinterest was the only social network that I ever liked, and they have now thrown me out for no reasons.
I dont understand what they call as spamming. I have never posted an affiliate link before, and all my pins are informative and does match my boards. I was even getting a couple of board invitations from some big boards. I read in some blog posts about people buying Pinterest accounts, and I was shocked to see that they are indeed cheap! Some are selling it for as cheap as $10 for 100 Pinterest accounts! They are not getting removed for those spam accounts, and Pinterest is deactivating real accounts like mine in their action against “Spamming”. Where are they headed ?
Could someone kindly get me back to pinning ?
So I think I’ve been hacked because there are all these people that I am not following showing up on my home page but I can’t seem to get rid of them. None of them are appearing on my people I’m following and I even unfollowed everyone that was on there just to be sure. How can I fix this?? Please help!!!
i have had many new people pop up in my pinterest feed that i did not follow, i go to my following page and they arent in my following list so that i can unfollow them, i go to their pinterest profiles and i see all their boards of which im not following not even 1 of them. i searched it and came to the conclusion i was hacked, but how do i get rid of them? i have tried deactivating and reactivating my account but that didnt work. any suggestions??
I’m having this same problem! I’ve tried blocking them but their pins still show up. Any help?!
Hello:
I am hoping that someone here can at least give me some advice,,, Pinterest I believe my account has been hacked… about 2 weeks ago Pinterest had been hacked and sent out emails and my pin account was one that had been compromised & to change my password… okay done, on March 06, then I had some suspicion followers, just like as some as was described in your comment section, I blocked them — but maybe I did not get all of them? Now my account is disabled? or I cannot access it in any way, I keep getting a 502 error… tried multiple things & suggestions from the HELP section on Pinterest.. I also put in a request for resolution,,, now the request I put in three weeks ago is still not resolved, either ,,, however, that is minor in comparison…. I don’t want to wait three maybe four weeks for a response…. does anyone know how I can gain access and change my pass-code & get beyond that 502 error code, this is so frustrating..
thanks
Joanny
I’m finding another issue with Pinterest: it looks like they auto-follow some boards for me so I can get fresh content when I come back to Pinterest if boards I follow are not active enough. However, I’m a dude, and Pinterest is following some boards for me based on totally different interests, such as girl hairs, nails, best wedding dressings, etc.
Not good..
Strange! The opposite seems to have happened to me. For some reason, all of my followers and people I had been following were deleted. I now have no personalized news feed. Lately my notification center has been going haywire, telling me that I have, say, 200 notifications when I only have 15. And everything is gone now… I wonder what the deal is.