TIFU: Six years ago I fell for a Snapchat scam that led to my nudes being stolen, and yesterday one of them was just posted to my old VSCO account.

TIFU. Okay, this is a long one - I apologize in advance. But I figure I should be detailed in case it helps anyone avoid this situation for themselves.

The Initial Snapchat Scam

Six years ago, one of my best friends, whom I snapped regularly, messaged me on Snapchat, sounding EXACTLY like herself. She said something about how she cracked her phone and was trying to use Snapchat on her dad's old ipad to contact friends, but the app kept asking her to verify her phone number if she wanted to keep using it. So, because she "couldn't use her phone" to verify, she asked me if she could just put in my number as the phone number instead. There were definitely other details used to incite urgency, but I can't remember exactly what they were. At the time, I was under a ton of commotion getting ready for a class I was nervous about, so I just said sure, whatever, and (as much as this pains me to say) I gave her the code. To be fair, this (fake) scenario would absolutely 1000% happen to this particular friend, but I still should have known better than to give anyone a code for any reason. Lesson learned.

That friend then FaceTimes me, which confused me because I thought her phone was broken and unusable. We both very quickly realize what had happened. Both of us, along with four or five of her other friends, had been scammed, hacked, and locked out of our accounts. Thankfully, I was able to get the scammer out of my account within an hour, but unfortunately, during that hour, they had access to the many, many explicit pictures of me in my saved "Memories" that I had taken when my (still current) partner and I were long distance for a year (again, I know I shouldn't have allowed those to remain saved in the app - I never thought I would fall for a scam like this, but lesson learned). I knew they had taken at least one picture that was saved in a message, because my partner got a notification that they had downloaded it while logged in. But I tried to (probably naively) maintain hope that the scammer didn't have enough time to go through all of the thousands of everyday regular non-explicit snapchat memories I had taken and saved since that year of long distance, when the majority of explicit pictures were taken.

Note (for anyone who may be facing a similar scam pattern): The scammer then kept texting my friend, pretending to be Snapchat Security, and stating that she needed to give over the code to her "For My Eyes Only" folder to verify the account. This confirmed for us that the point of the scam was to retrieve explicit photos.

I gathered all of the IP addresses associated with the scammer's log ins, the new phone number that was associated with the account once I logged back in, the phone number used to text my friend, and the usernames of all of her friends that had been scammed, and I submitted a cybercrime report to the FBI. Never heard back. When I tried to search for the IP addresses and phone numbers on my own, it was clear that the scammer had used a VPN and a Google Voice number that immediately rerouted you to another random phone number in the US when you called (my friend and I used a Google Voice # to try calling later to see if it was perhaps someone we knew). I also reached out to Google about this, and it seemed they couldn't do anything.

Yesterday - Nude was posted on VSCO

So, fast forward to present-day, six years later. Up until now, none of us had seen our explicit photos from the Snapchat scam anywhere on the internet. I would regularly reverse image search non-explicit parts of some of my photos, especially the one I knew had been screenshotted, to check for matches. And although I know that's a very faulty way of going about things, I was hopeful that the lack of results and the lack of related incidents in general meant that nothing had really resulted from the scam to my knowledge. Maybe they only got that one photo, that didn't have my face in it, and nothing else. Maybe I got them out of my account quickly enough that they weren't able to scroll back far enough in my memories while actively scamming other people to retrieve the rest of the photos. But I was wrong.

One of my old teammates texted one of my best friends yesterday saying that she was clearing out her VSCO and scrolling her feed when she saw a nude of mine come up, posted from my own account. I hadn't even thought of VCSO in over 10 years, and I barely ever used it when I had it, so this was shocking to me. The nude that was posted was a very old one, different from the one I had always known the scammer downloaded; the date of the photo that was posted confirmed for me that the scammer was able to retrieve many, many explicit photos from me while they were logged into my account. Probably all of them. This has been really, really hard for me to stomach and process.

The account had posted the nude 2 days prior. For whatever reason, they only posted that one, and didn't change the email to the account. So, thankfully, I was able to log back in, delete the photo, change the password, and log them out (after filing an NCII report with VSCO of course). Then, I went back into my old email that was associated with the account (note: VSCO doesn't allow for two-factor authentication), to see if there was any further evidence of activity. For multiple reasons that have nothing to do with this, VSCO messages went to my Trash folder, along with everything else that I've categorized as spam over the years. It turns out they had logged in on September 29 (no further IP information or anything, just "device"), posted this photo on October 3, and logged in again to check back in on it yesterday, October 5. At no point did they try to message me, extort me, lock me out, or anything. This series of events is interesting and confusing to me. Maybe they retrieved the nude from the dark web or gross forums, and they're doing this because they have a humiliation kink or something...? If anyone has any insight on why someone would do this in this way, please feel free to enlighten me.

As a reminder: my password for VSCO was not revealed or used in the initial Snapchat scam, so the VSCO hack must have connected leaked account information with the leaked nudes.

Notably, they also tried to log into my Facebook after they got into my VSCO. They weren't able to, thank GOD, because I have everything updated there and now use full security on my apps wherever I can.

But this series of events told me a few things:

(1) all of my nudes from the initial Snapchat scam have likely been distributed across the internet;

(2) my leaked account info, including my old email and whatever password I initially used for VSCO, has not only been distributed across the internet as well, but have been connected to those nudes; and

(3) the person who hacked me recently wanted to post explicit photos of me on multiple of my accounts, without necessarily extorting me for money, etc.

Questions:

Does anyone have any advice or clarification they can provide on this? I'm confused by the motivation to post me without extorting me. Is it a humiliation kink or fucked up misogynistic scheme?

And is there any way I can reliably get these photos and/or my leaked information off major forums now? I know there's no way to completely wipe the photos from places they've been saved, especially given the initial scam was six years ago. But I just feel so out of control because I know someone could always post them on accounts of their own or personally message them to people I'm connected to online, etc., since they're connected to identifiable information somewhere (like my old email). And I know I can try to get compromised passwords, etc. off the internet, but if anyone has any helpful information related to places where identifiable account information might be connected to leaked photos in this way, please let me know. Maybe that could help me at least narrow down a couple places to report.

TL;DR: My nudes got stolen after I got scammed on Snapchat six years ago, and one of them was just posted to my own VSCO yesterday, connecting leaked account information with the leaked nudes.