The Instagram and Spotify hacking ring
In December 2015 I received an email which seemed to be from a woman having ended up in a bad situation. She explained that "her Instagram had been hacked" and since she found my contact info in the app on her iPhone she mailed me and asked for help.
She also included a screenshot from her phone in the email, showing the curl license and my name in the "about" screen on the Instagram app. Somehow proving to me that I must have something to do with this.
I replied back to her in a timely fashion and explained that I have nothing to do with her being hacked (whatever it meant) and that I also have nothing to do with Instagram other than that they apparently use software I have written. I tried to explain how curl is Open Source and I just provide it free for anyone to use and that I do not know anyone at Instagram just because they use my code.
Before receiving that email, I had no idea Instagram used curl!
On January 19 2016, she writes again. This time she had apparently gotten "help" by a friend of hers and now she had more to say.
It starts out good and it shows she understood what I had said before.
Okay, now it turned bad again. She included another screenshot from her phone, showing my name in the "about" screen on the Spotify app on her phone.
Clearly those two screenshots were all the evidence we needed to prove me being in this "hacking ring" and she no longer believed that I was just an innocent producer of a software component.
She then ends the mail with this golden paragraph that is hard to decipher
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