For someone who hasn’t been on Twitter since it became a safe space for the far right under Elon Musk’s leadership, the new invite-only social media network Bluesky can feel like a nostalgic breath of fresh air. The vibes are great. A lot of old communities from Twitter that never quite made the jump to Mastodon — a harder-to-use federated social network — have shown up in Bluesky.

Like Mastodon, Bluesky is an open-source, decentralized social network. Unlike Mastodon, which is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, it’s simple to get started on Bluesky. The user interface is clean and familiar to people accustomed to modern commercial apps. Bluesky embraces user control over their timelines, both in terms of algorithmic choice — the Mastodon project is hostile to algorithms — and customizable content moderation.

There are other fundamental differences between the two projects. While Mastodon is a scrappy nonprofit, Bluesky PBLLC is a for-profit startup. And while Mastodon is a vibrant network of thousands of independent social media that federate with each other, Bluesky’s “decentralization” is only in theory. So far there’s only one site that uses Bluesky’s decentralized AT Protocol, and that site is Bluesky Social.

It is mostly for these and related reasons that people on Mastodon get very defensive when Bluesky comes up. “Why are you helping oligarchs test their products? Are they paying you or do you do it out of sheer loyalty?” one stranger asked me when I posted about some of Bluesky’s creative moderation features that had recently dropped.

Amid the noise, though, there are genuine concerns about how Bluesky is operated and what the people behind it aim to do. It’s wise to remember that the company started off with $13 million of funding from pre-Musk Twitter, when Jack Dorsey, who is now at Bluesky, was CEO.

The history and the arrangement raise several questions: Who owns Bluesky PBLLC? What is the role of Dorsey, who famously tweeted about Musk’s purchase of Twitter that “Elon is the singular solution I trust”? What is Bluesky’s business model? What prevents another Elon Musk from buying Bluesky PBLLC and destroying it 10 years down the line? Many of the answers are out there — many even posted to Bluesky itself by its employees. Since Bluesky is still a private invite-only site, here are some of these answers for Bluesky skeptics to see.

Who Owns Bluesky?

“Bluesky, the company, is a Public Benefit LLC. It is owned by Jay Graber and the Bluesky team,” according to the site’s Frequently Asked Questions page. This is exactly what Jeromy Johnson, a former engineer for the distributed file system IPFS and a technical adviser to Bluesky who goes by Whyrusleeping, said when asked in early April.

One user — who like nearly everyone else on the site was psyched to be essentially tweeting but without having to deal with Twitter — inquired who owns Bluesky. Why said that “the founding team holds the equity” and that Dorsey himself is not an owner. (You can verify that Why is part of the Bluesky team because of how self-verifying handles work in the AT Protocol; only people who control the domain name bsky.team are able to have handles like that.)

When asked for clarification about Bluesky’s ownership, Emily Liu, another member of the Bluesky team, told me that Bluesky has been offering employees equity as part of their compensation packages, as is a common practice with startups. She also confirmed that Bluesky PBLLC’s board consists of Graber, Dorsey, and Jeremie Miller, inventor of the open and decentralized chat protocol Jabber.

For burgeoning Twitter skeptics, this should be good news: a much better arrangement than if it were owned by Dorsey or, worse yet, if it were a subsidiary of Twitter. The arrangement also explains why Bluesky PBLLC appears on Dun & Bradstreet’s list of minority and women-owned businesses: Jay Graber, Bluesky PBLLC’s CEO and primary owner, is a woman of color.

What About Twitter’s Role?

In December 2019, Dorsey, who was Twitter’s CEO at the time, announced that the company was funding Bluesky, which he described as “a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”

This ultimately turned into the independent company Bluesky PBLLC, incorporated in late 2021, with $13 million in initial funding from Twitter.

Does Twitter, with Musk at the helm, have any power over Bluesky now? As is the habit of other Bluesky team members, Graber explained the situation on Bluesky. According to Graber, she “spent 6 mo of 2021 negotiating for bluesky to be built in an org independent from twitter, and boy was that the right decision.” In response to another question, Graber confirmed that Bluesky doesn’t “owe” Twitter anything.

Bluesky PBLLC is 100 percent independent from Twitter and Elon Musk.

What is a Public Benefit LLC?

In the name Bluesky PBLLC, PB stands for Public Benefit. PBLLCs are a relatively new type of corporation that’s designed for companies that want to promote a general or specific public benefit as opposed to just making a profit.

When whistleblower Chelsea Manning asked why Bluesky chose to incorporate as a PBLLC, Graber explained her reasoning.

According to Graber, they chose PBLLC because it was fast to form and because “being Public Benefit means shareholders can’t sue us for pursing mission over profit.” The mission appears to be the design and promotion of the AT Protocol and its ecosystem of (eventually) other social networks that federate with Bluesky Social, along with the larger Bluesky developer community that has sprung up.

Liu, who answered some of my questions, did not respond when I asked for the exact language the Bluesky PBLLC used to describe its public benefit mission when incorporating the company. She also didn’t say whether the company would publish its annual benefits reports — reports that PBLLCs are required to create each year, but PBLLCs incorporated in Delaware, where Bluesky was incorporated, are not required to make them public.

In her email, Liu said, “We’re generally not taking interviews right now because we’re heads down on work.”

Bluesky’s Business Model

AT Protocol is open, and the code that powers Bluesky Social is open source. Yet Bluesky PBLLC is still a for-profit company. How do they plan to make money? “We’ll be publishing a blog post on our monetization plans in a few weeks, and we’ll share more then,” Liu told me.

In the meantime, the team has openly discussed hints of some of their potential plans on Bluesky. According to Why, advertising might play a role in the future.

And Paul Frazee, an engineer who’s been livestreaming his Bluesky coding, hinted that the company may be considering some sort of paid subscription component. “[H]ypothetically speaking,” Frazee asked in a post, “if bluesky ever did a paid subscription thing, what would we call it.” Though Frazee was also quick to point out that he’s not as terrible at business as Musk is and wouldn’t use paid subscriptions to destroy the product — à la Twitter’s $8-a-month “verified” blue checkmarks.

Regardless of how Bluesky PBLLC eventually monetizes its product, if it gets its way, this monetization would only affect users of Bluesky Social. In the future, if you didn’t like the ads you were seeing in Bluesky, for example, the AT Protocol would allow you to take your account, including your handle, your followers, and all your posts, and move to a different social network you like better, so long as it also used the AT Protocol.

Resilient to Billionaires?

If we learned anything from Twitter over this last year, it’s that you can’t trust billionaires. By all accounts, the owners of Bluesky appear to be genuinely interested in remaking social media so that users have control instead of big tech companies like Twitter. But it’s possible that one day they could become seduced by obscene amounts of money to sell their shares of the company to an Elon Musk character who is hellbent on owning the libs. What would happen then?

Part of the problem with Twitter’s demise is that so many people have spent the last decade building up an audience there, making it very hard to finally pull the plug and start over from scratch somewhere else — even after several months of Musk’s policies have rapidly made the site more toxic and less useful at the same time.

The whole idea behind the AT Protocol, though, is that if you don’t like Bluesky Social for whatever reason, you can simply move to a rival social media site without losing your data or social graph. This is called “account portability,” and it’s baked into the core of the AT Protocol. It’s also a feature that Mastodon doesn’t support; it is possible to move your Mastodon account from one server to another and keep your followers, but only if your original server cooperates, and you’re willing to lose your old data.

So hypothetically, if a billionaire one day buys Bluesky PBLLC and ruins it, it won’t matter. Anyone who doesn’t like how Bluesky Social is run can simply switch to a rival service without losing their post history or their followers. When Musk took over Twitter and starting bringing back neo-Nazis and banning antifascists, imagine if you could have simply ported your account over to another social media site and then just kept tweeting like normal. That’s the promise of the AT Protocol.

Account portability is exactly how, once it begins to federate with other servers, Bluesky hopes to avoid the confusion that Mastodon is famous for. As Frazee explained, keeping Bluesky easy to use is a top priority.

Bluesky’s usability plan is simple: When you install the app and create an account, you’ll get an account on the default server, Bluesky Social (unless you already have a preference). Then, at any point after that, you can simply move your account to any other server that you prefer.

Of course, account portability is only possible if there are other AT Protocol sites to port your account to, and so far, Bluesky Social is the only one.

“Right now, Bluesky is the only option because we haven’t launched federation yet, but we’ll be starting with a sandbox environment for federation soon,” Liu told me, mentioning a recent blog post that gives an overview of how it will work. “Other companies are working on Bluesky and atproto integrations already, and when the federation sandbox launches, we’ll work with community developers and external teams to build more on the AT Protocol.”

It’s too early to tell whether Bluesky will succeed, but if it works out the way the team hopes, social media users will have far more power and tech companies — and the billionaires who own them — will have far less.

The post Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Twitter last month submitted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice to GitHub — a web service designed to host user-uploaded source code — demanding that certain content be taken down because it was allegedly “[p]roprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.” Twitter subsequently filed a declaration in federal court supporting its request for a DMCA subpoena, the ostensible aim of which was “to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.”

However, Twitter appears to have revised its DMCA notice, essentially a claim of copyright infringement, the same day it was filed to request not only information about the uploader, but also “any related upload / download / access history (and any contact info, IP addresses, or other session info related to same), and any associated logs related to this repo or any forks thereof.” In other words, Twitter is now seeking information not only about the alleged leaker, but also about anyone who interacted with the particular GitHub repository, the online space for storing source code, in any way, including simply by accessing it. Trying to strong-arm GitHub into revealing information about visitors to a particular repository it hosts via a request for a subpoena is a move reminiscent of the Justice Department attempting to compel a web-hosting company to reveal information about visitors to an anti-Trump website.

DMCA: The Doxxing and Censorship Tool of Choice

This isn’t the first time that corporations have tried to use DMCA subpoenas to identify leakers. A Marvel Studios affiliate recently petitioned for DMCA subpoenas to force Reddit and Google to reveal information about someone who uploaded a film script to Google and posted about it on Reddit before the movie was released. DMCA claims also have a sordid history of being used in doxxing attempts. False DMCA claims can be filed to lure a targeted user to then file a counterclaim, which necessitates that they fill in their name and address, which in turn gets passed on to the original filer. At other times, the DMCA is used simply to censor content, whether to muzzle members of civil society or for reputation management.

No Subpoena Required?

GitHub has seemed all too willing to provide information about both its repository owners and its visitors, even without a subpoena. When the owner of another, unrelated repository recently asked GitHub to provide access logs of users who had visited it, GitHub appears to have readily complied, obscuring only the last octet of the visitor IP address, with the unredacted portion still potentially revealing information such as a user’s internet service provider and approximate location.

There are also any number of public ways to extract user information from GitHub, such as email addresses associated with a particular GitHub account. Ironically, some scripts hosted on GitHub are designed to automate the exfiltration of a GitHub user’s email address. Once an email address is learned, the process of requesting a subpoena for further information about a particular user may be repeated in an attempt to obtain yet more sensitive data.

Musk’s Bag of Tricks

Aside from claiming to use watermarking methods to catch leakers, Musk’s other companies have also sought subpoenas to force service providers to reveal information about leakers. For instance, when Musk zeroed in on (and subsequently harassed) a suspected leaker who provided internal documents to a reporter about large amounts of waste being generated at Tesla’s “Gigafactory,” Tesla moved to subpoena Apple, AT&T, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Open Whisper Systems (the organization formerly behind the secure messaging app Signal), and WhatsApp. The proposed subpoenas “commanded” their targets to preserve any information about the suspected leaker’s accounts, as well as all documents that the suspected leaker “has deleted from the foregoing accounts but that are still accessible by you.”

In addition to proposed subpoenas, Tesla has reportedly tried to identify leakers by reviewing surveillance footage to see who had been taking photos (the original Business Insider story that prompted the Tesla investigation mentioned that the source had provided images to corroborate their claims of waste at the factory). The company has also checked file access logs to see who had accessed data that was provided to the news outlet.

Following identification of the suspected leaker, Tesla reportedly engaged in an extensive surveillance campaign, including hacking the suspect’s phone; requesting that the suspect turn over their laptop for an “update” that was, in fact, a forensic audit; deploying a plainclothes security guard to monitor the suspect on the factory floor; and hiring private investigators to conduct further surveillance.

Takeaways for Leakers

Given the lax approach to divulging user information by service providers, coupled with the aggressive tactics employed by companies to reveal sources, the takeaway for would-be leakers is clear: Do not trust service providers to protect any information they may have about you. Websites may reveal information about the leaker, intentionally or not, and whether legally obligated or of their own accord. Leakers would do well to avoid using their home or other proximate internet connection and to further obfuscate it using tools such as the Tor Browser. Additionally, it’s best to ensure that any information required to set up a particular account, such as an email address or phone number, not be traceable to the leaker.

The post Twitter Deploys Classic Musk Tactics to Hunt Down Leaker appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, humans started the process of domesticating plants and animals for food. Back then, options were pretty limited, and we only had the resources that were directly in front of us. So it made a lot of sense to farm animals like goats and chickens, as they could easily provide us with sustenance in the form of milk and eggs.

Over the centuries, domestication gave way to a food system that rests predominantly on animal agriculture. Now, we raise not just goats and chickens, but cows, sheep, turkeys, and pigs in their millions to produce meat, dairy, and eggs for the world. But the truth is, what made sense thousands of years ago just doesn’t make sense anymore. To put it simply, raising all of these animals just isn’t sustainable.

For starters, the livestock industry takes up huge amounts of resources, like land, water, and crops. And it’s also a leading cause of emissions. Animal agriculture contributes 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gasses, according to the United Nations. It’s not surprising. Just one cow will belch around 220 pounds of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere over their lifetime. Right now, the global cattle population stands at one billion. You do the math.

For the benefit of the planet, and indeed, the future of humanity, it’s time to change the way we produce food. And, if we embrace new research and innovation, doing so is within reach. A new technology called precision fermentation is already emerging, and it could be the answer to a truly sustainable food system. Here’s more about what it is, how it works, and which brands are using it today.

The history of precision fermentation

Precision fermentation sounds futuristic and unfamiliar, but it’s actually not new at all. In fact, it has been used in the pharmaceutical industry for quite a while now.

According to Reboot Food—a campaign dedicated to precision fermentation awareness and the cultivation of a sustainable food system—prior to the 1970s, most insulin (a hormone medication used to treat people with diabetes) was sourced from animal agriculture. But this method was challenging and unsustainable, as producing just one kilogram of insulin required around 50,000 cows and pigs.

But, in the late 1970s, a pharmaceutical company called Genentech changed the game for insulin, by using precision fermentation to create human insulin. It wasn’t just more sustainable, but it was also cheaper and higher in quality. Today, pig and cow insulin is quite rare in the pharmaceutical world, as insulin made with precision fermentation accounts for around 99 percent of the market.

But precision fermentation’s roots go even further back than the 1970s. Ultimately, it’s a refined form of brewing. And humans have been brewing beer, which is created by fermentation with yeast, for centuries.

“Yeast, bacteria, and even microalgaes have been used in our food systems for thousands of years and have been used in pharmaceutical manufacturing for the past century,” Adam Leman, Ph.D—the lead scientist in fermentation at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes alternative protein development—explained to VegNews. “Precision Fermentation is using these microbes to make an ingredient for food.”

Perfect Day/Instagram

What is precision fermentation?

According to Leman, precision fermentation in food production involves using microbes to make protein, fat, a pigment, or even a molecule for flavor or aroma. “That ingredient could be something that the microbe already makes, which we see for some flavor molecules and pigments,” he says.

“Or it could be something that the microbe has been designed to do,” continues Leman. “In other words, where the genetic code for a food ingredient protein or the enzymes that make the ingredient are introduced to the microbe.”

The latter method is used by California-based food technology startup Perfect Day, which relies on precision fermentation to make animal-free, milk-identical whey protein.

“We first give microflora the genetic instructions for making whey protein, downloaded from an online database,” Nicki Briggs, Perfect Day’s vice president of corporate communications, explains to VegNews. After that, the microflora ferments in a feedstock, or nutrient mix, which consists of sugar, water, and vitamins. “Imagine a brewery,” says Briggs. “But instead of brewing beer, we’re ‘brewing’ milk protein.” 

Then, Perfect Day uses “gold-standard” technology from the dairy industry to filter the milk protein. But unlike a dairy company, the brand is left with whey protein that didn’t require any animals to make. “[But it’s still] identical to the dairy protein that’s been consumed for generations,” notes Briggs.

Why should we embrace this technology?

Just like we moved away from animal agriculture and embraced precision fermentation for insulin production, we can do the same for food. And we must, believes George Monbiot, who is an environmentalist and spokesperson for the Reboot Food campaign. “If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale,” he wrote for the Guardian in November 2022.

Leman agrees that precision fermentation brings with it a whole host of planetary benefits. It requires fewer resources, produces less waste, and doesn’t need as much land, as there is no livestock to graze. But on top of that, it is also better for public health. After all, zoonotic diseases, which are diseases that jump the species barrier from animals to humans, are a real pandemic threat.

Unsplash

“Precision fermentation allows for a truly no-compromise option in our future food system,” adds Briggs. “Because it’s identical to traditional dairy protein, our animal-free protein allows for products which offer the taste, texture, functionality, and nutrition consumers love from dairy without lactose, and with a significant reduction in environmental footprint.”

But beyond these positives, precision fermentation is also exciting from the point of view that it opens up new possibilities in the world of food science. “Traditional food systems were established with animals that were easy to domesticate, not because they produced the most nutritious or flavorful foodstuffs,” says Leman. “Doing this using precision fermentation without the animal opens up doors that weren’t previously possible to open and explore.”

Who’s using precision fermentation now?

Perhaps the most famous example of a brand already utilizing precision fermentation to encourage consumers to try more plant-based foods is Impossible Foods. The California-based vegan meat company used the technology to improve the taste and texture of its plant-based protein with its own leghemoglobin protein.

And, in 2021, The Every Company, another California-based biotechnology firm, landed $175 million to continue with its research into animal-free protein made using precision fermentation technology. Right now, it is particularly focused on making egg whites, without the eggs. “The role of egg white protein in food products is so vast,” says Leman. “I’m excited to see where it will be used.”

In dairy, things are getting exciting. As we’ll delve into shortly, there are already products on the market made with Perfect Day’s animal-free whey. And Singapore biotech company TurtleTree is also working on the milk protein Lactoferrin. Several companies are also working on creating casein, which is important for cheesemaking, with precision fermentation.

Outside of animal products, companies like New York’s C16 Biosciences have also created a precision fermentation version of palm oil, which is another infamously unsustainable industry. “We are in the midst of a rapid increase and diversification of precision fermentation products,” says Leman.

The Every Company

Is precision fermentation dairy safe?

There’s no doubt, precision fermentation is exciting. It’s innovative, sustainable, and scalable. But none of this matters if it isn’t actually safe to consume. But if this was one of your worries, you can strike it off the list, says Leman, because, he says, safety is “paramount” to the growth of this industry.

“First, all the facilities that generate precision fermentation ingredients are designed and maintained to be food-safe and follow procedures to keep them clean and free of toxins and contaminants,” he explains. “Next, as for the microbes and ingredients themselves, they are scrutinized and evaluated closely by a process of evaluation called the “Generally Recognized as Safe” affirmation process.” The latter essentially means that the FDA’s qualified experts have affirmed that an ingredient has been shown as safe for its intended use.

Briggs adds that safety shouldn’t be a concern for consumers when it comes to precision fermentation and that people should “feel confident” consuming Perfect Day’s products. “We are regulated by the FDA,” she confirms. “We were recognized as Generally Recognized as Safe before bringing any products to market.”

What if I have a dairy allergy?

It’s important to note that while Perfect Day’s products are safe for most people—if you have a dairy allergy, you should avoid them. After all, its whey protein might be animal-free, but it is designed to be identical to the real thing. And while it is working on how the allergenicity of this protein can be reduced, it isn’t there yet.

“For individuals with a milk allergy, we need to be clear: Perfect Day makes milk protein,” reads the Perfect Day website. “Though not derived from a cow, our protein is not dairy–free and any product that contains it contains a milk allergen. These products are not suitable for anyone with a milk protein allergy.”

Precision fermentation dairy products

The world of precision fermentation dairy is exciting. Already, you can sample several products on the market that contain Perfect Day’s animal-free whey. From ice cream to cream cheese, here’s what you can put to the taste test right now. But keeps your eyes peeled: there are more coming, in the form of chocolate, milk, and more.

Brave Robot/Instagram

1 Brave Robot

According to Brave Robot, its “planet-friendly” animal-free ice cream uses 23 percent less water than conventional dairy and produces 72-percent fewer emissions. It’s all just as creamy as the real deal, and as a bonus, it’s lactose-free, so even lactose intolerant people can enjoy its wide range of flavors, which include Vanilla, Buttery Pecan, Blueberry Pie, PB ‘N Fudge, and Hazelnut Chocolate Chunk.
Check it out

Bored Cow/Instagram

2 Bored Cow

The plant-based milk market is flourishing. If you want milk made from oat, almond, hemp, soy, or macadamia nuts, for example, it’s easy to find. But this milk isn’t in that category. Thanks to Perfect Day’s animal-free whey, these milkshakes are just like the versions made with real cow’s milk, only without the cow. You can try it in Vanilla, Chocolate, or Strawberry flavors.
Check it out

Nurishh

3 Nurishh Incredible Dairy

Nurishh is already known for its wide range of tasty, nutritious plant-based cheeses. But with its Incredible Dairy range, it has taken cream cheese, specifically, to the next level, using Perfect Day’s animal-free whey. If you want to put it to the bagel test, there are three varieties to try: Original, Chive & Onion, and Strawberry.
Check it out

MyProtein

4 Whey Forward

If you’re working on your fitness and you want to stock up on protein, sure, you could choose one of the many standard whey protein powder options on the market. But this isn’t one of them. This game-changing powder has the same texture, taste, and has 20 grams of protein, but it’s totally animal-free.
Check it out

This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

Engineers at Columbia University recently created a seven-ingredient vegan cheesecake that was assembled and cooked entirely by a 3D-printing machine and, uniquely, cooked using laser technology while it prints. This process was documented in a study published in the journal NPJ Science of Food.

Food printing is an application of additive manufacturing that utilizes user-generated models to construct 3D shapes from edible food inks, while laser cooking uses high-energy targeted light for high-resolution tailored heating. Software is used to combine and cook ingredients, allowing chefs to more easily control the nutrient content of a meal.

The machines needed to create and bake a 3D-printed dessert already exist, but the Columbia University researchers wanted to show how consumers could use software-controlled cooking at home.

Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia Engineering

“Digital cooking technologies allow an end consumer to take more control of the macro and micro nutrients that they consume on a per meal basis and due to the rapid growth and potential benefits of 3D technology advancements, a 3D printer may become a staple home and industrial cooking device,” the study says.

Like the Easy-Bake Oven of the 21st century, 3D printing at home would require a place where consumers can download recipes, create their own recipes, and get inspiration for what they can do with the machine, the researchers say.

3D printing a customizable vegan cheesecake

Creating a slice of vegan cheesecake was the next step in a years-long effort by study coauthor Jonathan Blutinger—a mechanical engineer and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia Engineering’s Creative Machines Lab—and his colleagues to develop various foods with larger numbers of ingredients. 

His efforts started with learning how to bake various doughs with lasers and have evolved into developing a machine that can intake, print, and bake a total of 18 ingredients—which could be a record-setting number of ingredients in a single 3D-printed food product.

Jonathan Blutinger/Columbia Engineering

For this study, Blutinger and his colleagues experimented with a vegan cheesecake recipe, combining graham cracker paste and other ingredients to churn out a single, customized slice of dessert with flavors such as cherry, banana, peanut butter, and hazelnut spread. One slice took approximately 30 minutes to produce.

But what stands out with this research is that it used lasers to cook the food as it was printed. The heat essentially prompted a phase change from paste to solid, which is critical to traditional baked desserts.

The benefits of 3D printing

The main benefit of using 3D printing is that the method is exacting, allowing chefs to use extremely precise amounts of ingredients that can be baked or heated differently from moment to moment. There’s also the potential to make foods to a person’s preferences, like the ability to customize every slice of the cheesecake for individual tastes and preferences.

Additionally, 3D printing can allow nutrition-conscious eaters to produce food with precise calorie counts or carbohydrate, fat, and sugar contents.

However, Blutinger also hopes to explore a nutritional study to analyze how cooking with lasers might affect the food on a molecular level which could go a long way toward increasing the public’s comfort level with such a novel method.

3D-printed vegan food is here

Using 3D printing to create food isn’t a new concept. Some companies have even taken on the meat industry by creating 3D-printed vegan meat that is customizable right down to the macronutrients.

SavorEat

Last year, Israeli company SavorEat came to market with 3D-printed vegan turkey burgers and pork-free breakfast sausages. The company’s technology relies on its Smart Robot Chef, which is powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

The machine receives preference inputs—such as preferred protein and fat compositions and cooking preferences—from users interfacing with an application. It then produces and cooks the desired plant-based meat from these inputs.

Revo Foods

Another company is Vienna-based Revo Foods, which recently unveiled its “ultra realistic” whole-cut plant-based salmon. Expected to launch in stores this year, the new product is made using 3D food printing technology and aims to replicate the eating experience of whole-cut fish filets without the need to harm a single fish.

“An industry built around this technology may be on the horizon, creating a new vision of better nutrition, better food accessibility and palatability for many, increasing food safety and adding art and cutting-edge science to the most basic human need—nourishment,” the 3D printing study concludes.

This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

by Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Just after midnight on Sept. 13, Kristian “Murda” Murphy was watching TV at home in Boca Raton, Florida, when his phone began buzzing.

“Murda u always outside we gon see you,” read a message from an account he didn’t recognize.

Murphy is a music manager, producer and entrepreneur who has worked with high-profile rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, among other artists. Hours before the threats began, 6ix9ine posted a message to his more than 20 million followers on Instagram that mocked the recent death of rapper PnB Rock. Taking exception to the post, people began blowing up Murphy’s phone.

“I’m sitting home by myself literally watching TV, all of a sudden I see these texts started coming in and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” said Murphy, in a gravelly voice that retains the accents of his native Yonkers, New York. In addition to threatening bodily harm, the anonymous messengers told Murphy they were coming for one of his most valuable assets — the @murdamurphy Instagram account. It had more than 300,000 followers and brought in thousands of dollars a month thanks to people and companies who paid Murphy to share sponsored posts.

“WE PACKING ACCOUNTS SOON 🤣🤣” read a message from a person who identified himself as OBNBrandon.

Meta suspended Kristian “Murda” Murphy’s Instagram account hours after OBN threatened to take it down. (Kendrick Brinson, special to ProPublica)

Murphy didn’t know it, but he was in the crosshairs of one of the most prolific and notorious members of a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them. While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app’s slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.

A ProPublica investigation found that OBN, who also goes by OBNbrandon and Brandon, has prompted Meta to ban an array of influencers and entertainment figures. In an article he wrote for factz.com last year, OBN dubbed himself the “log-out king” because “I have deleted multiple celebrities + influencers on Meta & Instagram.”

“I made about $300k just off banning and unbanning pages,” he wrote.

OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta’s customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company’s standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets’ names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they’ll be barred for violating Meta’s ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account.

Models, businesspeople, marketers and adult performers across the United States told ProPublica that OBN had ruined their businesses and lives with spurious complaints, even causing one woman to consider suicide. More than half a dozen people with over 45 million total followers on Instagram told ProPublica they lost their accounts temporarily or permanently shortly after OBN threatened to report them. They say Meta failed to help them and to take OBN and other account manipulators seriously. One person who said she was victimized by OBN has an ongoing civil suit against Meta for lost income, while others sent the company legal letters demanding payment.

“Once you’re put on Brandon’s radar, whether someone’s paying him or not, he has this personal investment in making sure that your life is miserable and that he’ll try and get as much money out of you as he possibly can,” said Kay Jenkins, a Miami real estate agent and model. Her main Instagram account with roughly 100,000 followers has been repeatedly deactivated since 2021.

Kay Jenkins, a Miami real estate agent and model, says that OBN got her Instagram account banned and then duped her into paying him to get it back. (Kendrick Brinson, special to ProPublica)

A Meta spokesperson acknowledged that OBN has had short-term success in getting accounts removed by abusing systems intended to help enforce community standards. But the company has addressed those situations and taken down dozens of accounts linked to OBN, the spokesperson said. Most often, the spokesperson said, OBN scammed people by falsely claiming to be able to ban and restore accounts.

“We know the impact these scams can have on people which is why we continue investing to protect our users, including updating our support systems and keeping the scammers out,” said the spokesperson, who asked not to be identified due to security concerns. “This remains a highly adversarial space, with scammers constantly trying to evade detection by social media platforms.”

The story of how OBN has manipulated Meta’s systems is a cautionary tale for social media platforms. While the company is often criticized for being slow to take down misleading or offensive material, OBN was able to make a lucrative living by finding the pressure points that prompt Meta to act quickly based on false reports.

Murphy said that’s exactly what happened to him. Until OBN came along, he was earning between $15,000 and $20,000 a month from his Instagram account. It was filled with pictures of him with rappers and well-known figures from the Miami nightlife. Murphy, a stocky man with short blond hair and permanent five o’clock shadow, typically posed in black clothes, aviator sunglasses and thick diamond chains, with one or both of his middle fingers extended at the camera. He charged aspiring entrepreneurs between $2,000 and $5,000 per story to be featured in a post on his verified account.

“People pay me all the time to post promos for music, crypto,” he said. “I can make five, 10 grand by accident if I needed to. … The money’s crazy.”

Murphy had never heard of OBN until that September morning. He went to bed shortly after 3 a.m. and woke up to discover his Instagram account was disabled.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever had my account taken, ever, in my life. My heart dropped,” he said.

He was initially successful in getting Meta to reactivate it. But it’s been offline since December. Meta declined to comment on Murphy’s experience.

“I make money with that account, so it’s not fair to me that this guy has more power than Meta — it’s like a multibillion-billion-billion-dollar company,” Murphy said. “And they can’t do nothing about it.”

Online, OBN portrays himself as something of a gangster. Videos and photos he’s posted indicate he drives a white Lamborghini and wears expensive watches.

His main marketing vehicle for his services is the messaging app Telegram, where he has run a channel called @teamobn since August 2021. He posts about accounts he says he got banned, unbanned or verified. He touts software he uses to file false reports that allege an account violated Meta’s community guidelines, triggering a takedown.

He describes various strategies he uses to get accounts banned. For example, he says he can get a legitimate account suspended for violating Meta’s rule against impersonation by taking a verified Instagram account and changing its display name, profile photo and content to mirror his target’s. Then he sends Meta a report claiming that the legitimate account is impersonating the verified account.

Jilted lovers, jealous friends and business rivals use his services. OBN wrote that he also targets people for his own amusement, because they insulted a friend or client, or because they offer rival services. After banning an account, he frequently offers to reactivate it for a fee as high as $5,000, kicking off a cycle of bans and reactivations that continues until the victim runs out of money or stops paying.

Several notable people in the often-intertwined worlds of hip-hop, Miami nightlife, OnlyFans models and online influencers, including Celina Powell and Myron Gaines, have endorsed OBN. Powell is an online influencer who claims to have had sexual relationships with prominent rappers and has amassed more than 3 million followers on Instagram. Gaines co-hosts the “Fresh & Fit” podcast, a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers that bills itself as providing “the TRUTH to Females, Fitness, and Finances.” Gaines, whose legal name is Amrou A. Fudl, was temporarily banned from TikTok for misogynistic comments.

On Oct. 21, 2021, Gaines paused the broadcast to offer a plug. “​Shouts out to our boy Brandon. For y’all that don’t know or follow me on Instagram on @unplugfit, I got my shit banned and then I’m back up now and my boy @obn.here was the one that got it back,” Gaines said, as an image of OBN’s Instagram account flashed on the screen. “So if you’ve got issues with Instagram, you get banned, whatever it is, this is the guy that you want to fucking contact.” Gaines didn’t respond to requests for comment. After ProPublica contacted Gaines, the video of the “Fresh & Fit” episode that featured his OBN shoutout was set to private, removing it from public view.

“Fresh & Fit” co-host Myron Gaines promoted OBN’s services and Instagram account. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Those who said they were targeted by OBN include Adam22, the host of the popular hip-hop podcast “No Jumper,” who has 1.6 million Instagram followers, and Tommy Rodriguez, a Florida businessman with 1 million followers. OBN has said that he was responsible for banning Asian Doll, a rapper with 4.2 million followers; she did not respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on all three cases.

OBN often targets women who rely on Instagram to draw people to their pages on OnlyFans, where they charge subscribers to view sexually explicit content.

“This is how I feed myself and my family,” said Danii Banks, an OnlyFans model with close to 8 million Instagram followers. She said she lost $300,000 in income when OBN induced Instagram to take down her account. He extorted thousands of dollars from her to restore her account, but it remained down, she said.

“It’s like someone lighting a fire on your business and just walking away.”

Meta declined to comment on Banks.

Banks lives in the Las Vegas area, as does OBN, according to posts, emails and public records. Banks reported him to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI for defrauding her, but she hasn’t heard back, she said. OBN, meanwhile, appears to have pursued a job with the Las Vegas police while mocking attempts by Meta and law enforcement to investigate him.

Last summer, he posted an email from the LVMPD’s Office of Human Resources that said the recipient, whose name was redacted, had met the requirements to continue the application process for becoming a police cadet. It said a written exam would be held; the date was also redacted.

“Wish me luck boys,” OBN wrote in his Telegram channel.

OBN told his followers that he’d applied to become a Las Vegas police cadet. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

The next day, he shared a video shot in the LVMPD parking lot. “It went well,” he wrote and added a thumbs-up emoji.

Roughly a month later, OBN joked about an email from Meta telling him that it had complied with a request from an unnamed law enforcement agency for data regarding one of his accounts.

“Bro instagram or meta at this point is beyond cringe lmao,” he wrote on Telegram, using the popular acronym for “laughing my ass off.”

Despite his frequent activity on Telegram and Instagram, and the shoutouts from major podcasts and influencers, OBN’s true identity — and even whether the account is run by one person or more than one — has remained a mystery.

ProPublica’s investigation led to one person who either is OBN or is closely linked to him: 20-year-old Edwin Reyes-Martinez, who lives with his mother in an apartment complex roughly 13 miles north of the Las Vegas strip.

Numerous clues connected Reyes-Martinez to OBN. Victims said OBN told them to send money to a bank account in the name of Edwin Reyes, or via an email address, ermtz030@icloud.com, that included Reyes-Martinez’s initials. That address also matched a partially redacted email, 030@icloud.com, that’s listed in the Las Vegas police letter OBN posted on Telegram.

A similar string of letters and numbers appears in a Twitter username, @ermtz030. That account bears Reyes-Martinez’s name and photo and features videos filmed inside a white Lamborghini. Although the videos don’t show the driver’s face, he is wearing a gold ring that resembles one worn by Reyes-Martinez in photos from his Facebook account. Another Facebook photo showed Reyes-Martinez posing in front of a white Lamborghini similar to the one featured in OBN’s Telegram profile.

The email address that OBN told victims to send payments to includes a string of characters that match the username on a Twitter account linked to Reyes-Martinez. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Visited at his home in early February, Reyes-Martinez was dressed in a baggy, orange long-sleeve shirt, brown pants and brown slippers. A pair of gold and diamond studs sparkled in his ears. At first, he denied knowing who OBN is or having anything to do with him.

After being told that his own bank account had accepted more than $10,000 in payments intended for OBN in just the past few months, he changed his story. He said that someone named Brandon asked him to funnel money through his bank account to unknown recipients.

“There’s an individual that asked me if I can receive a payment,” he said. “I have no idea what that payment is for. I received them as a favor for the person.”

He pulled out his phone and showed an Instagram account called @madetoomuchmoney that he said belongs to the Brandon who contacted him. He said he didn’t know where the money went or what Brandon’s last name is. “I know a lot of Brandons.”

He said he works full time in a warehouse. “You see my hands? These are hard work hands,” he said, holding them out. “If I was OBN, I wouldn’t be working.”

ProPublica also submitted a request to the Las Vegas police for records related to any application by Reyes-Martinez to the department’s cadet program. The department declined, citing a Nevada law that allows it to withhold personnel records.

After the meeting in his apartment, Reyes-Martinez did not respond to follow-up questions. Meta sent him a cease-and-desist letter on March 17, about two weeks after ProPublica contacted the company for comment on OBN’s activities and on the evidence connecting Reyes-Martinez to OBN. A spokesperson said Meta had banned him from its platforms but declined to share the letter.

Account banning is just one of several lucrative schemes that prey on Instagram, which is uniquely important for celebrities, entrepreneurs, influencers and anyone seeking clout and status. Last year, a ProPublica investigation exposed a million-dollar operation that saw people pay $25,000 or more to fraudulently obtain verified accounts.

The verification badge, a blue tick added next to an account’s name, is applied to accounts that Instagram determines are authentic, unique, complete and notable. Verified accounts can charge more for sponsored posts, are given prominence by Instagram’s algorithms, and are seen as more difficult for people like OBN to take down. The ProPublica story prompted Meta to remove verification badges from hundreds of accounts.

OBN has said that he can take down verified accounts. “If you want someone smoked we talk 4 figures or nothing,” he wrote in his Telegram channel. In a separate post, he offered to create verified accounts for a $15,000 fee.

Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including “​​access to a real person for common account issues.” The Meta spokesperson said the company has invested in new account security and recovery measures, including a tool to help users who’ve been hacked. It’s also giving more users an opportunity to complain to a human agent rather than a bot.

The 1996 federal Communications Decency Act generally exempts platforms from legal liability related to the behavior of their users. However, the Federal Trade Commission has required several online platforms to bolster their security.

“If somebody is able to get into the account, the FTC doesn’t treat that company as a victim. They treat them as part of the problem,” said Eric Goldman, a professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara School of Law.

Meta has been under a consent decree with the FTC since 2012 because of allegations that the company, then known as Facebook, violated its privacy promises to users.

Some OBN victims have tried to hold Meta accountable. In late 2021, Tiara Johnson, a former adult performer who had more than 2.8 million Instagram followers when she lost her account, filed a breach of contract suit against Meta, which is pending in federal court. She said the company wrongly removed her account. Her suit includes screenshots of a conversation with OBN in which he says someone paid him $3,000 to ban her account. She then paid him the same amount to get it back, but he didn’t get it reactivated.

In February, Meta moved to dismiss the case, saying it has no obligation to provide an Instagram account to Johnson. The court is scheduled to consider the motion in June.

OBN can’t deactivate accounts by himself; he needs Meta to do it, either by triggering its automated systems or by getting a worker to take action. He has often boasted of bribing workers at Instagram and Meta, which recently acknowledged firing or disciplining workers who took bribes to access user accounts. ProPublica could not identify any Meta workers who accepted bribes from OBN.

But OBN did appear to have advance knowledge of a cease-and-desist letter sent on behalf of Meta to online marketer Joey Hickson.

Hickson built a business running large social media accounts like @break and @lmao, and he had four Instagram accounts with tens of millions of followers. He said he paid OBN for services such as helping people get an Instagram username they wanted or obtaining verified accounts.

After initially cooperating, OBN stopped delivering, according to Hickson. Then OBN started threatening to take Hickson’s accounts down. Last Sept. 22, OBN taunted Hickson on Instagram. “Enjoy your c&d,” he wrote, referring to the cease-and-desist letter sent by a law firm representing Meta.

Hickson immediately checked his email and saw that he had received just such a letter from Perkins Coie, a law firm that said it was writing on behalf of Meta. The letter said an investigation found that he and his company were “abusing Instagram” by offering account reactivation and verification services and by selling fake engagement such as likes and followers. It was banning Hickson and taking down his accounts.

OBN “knew before I did,” Hickson said.

OBN posted a message in his Telegram channel to celebrate that Hickson’s personal Instagram account, @joey, had been deactivated. He accused Hickson of stealing $20,000 from him and said, “enjoy the c&d my brother.”

When Meta sent marketer Joey Hickson a cease-and-desist letter, OBN bragged about it on Telegram. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

OBN then tried to convince Hickson to pay him $15,000 to reverse the ban. He said he could get Meta and its law firm to withdraw the sanction because he was responsible for it. He said another hacker had created several Instagram accounts with fabricated accusations against Hickson and then sent the complaints to a Perkins Coie attorney. Referring to the lawyer as “my people,” he said he’d tell her that the accounts were “falsely made” to frame Hickson.

“Buddy I’m the one who did it who do you think she [the lawyer] gon listen to lmao I bring her clients everyday,” OBN wrote.

OBN asked Hickson to pay him through an intermediary: Dan Folger, a former photographer for rap star Wiz Khalifa who has over 300,000 Instagram followers and a Telegram channel where he sells Instagram services such as account reactivation. OBN has posted screenshots in his Telegram channel that show crypto payments from Folger to OBN. OBN has also shared video security footage, presumably supplied by Folger, of a ProPublica reporter visiting Folger’s Nevada home. In a Telegram chat, Folger denied working with OBN. He did not respond to detailed questions sent via his attorney.

Hickson rejected OBN’s offer, saying he wasn’t aware of anyone who had gotten a cease-and-desist retracted. He denies that he broke Meta’s rules. “I’ve spent a decade of my life building what I built only to have someone come in and tarnish that. I’m just trying to get my accounts back and my life back.”

Meta said Hickson’s accounts were appropriately taken down for violating Instagram’s terms of service. Perkins Coie and the attorney mentioned by OBN did not respond to requests for comment.

Before the bans and the victims, before the white Lambo, OBN was just a teenager with a PlayStation. “We used to just play games online,” Syenrai said in a telephone interview. Syenrai is the internet handle of a young man who was once prominent in the Instagram banning community. He requested that his real name not be used. Syenrai knew OBN as Brandon when they met online around 2018. They have never met face-to-face. He said he believes that Reyes-Martinez is at least partially responsible for the online activities carried out under the OBN handle, but that more than one person may be involved.

Syenrai said that Brandon earned money by selling a how-to guide to scamming. “The guides were easily found online for free, but OBN sold them for $45 a pop,” he said.

Brandon used the OBN moniker specifically for scamming, Syenrai said. Asked what the acronym stands for, Syenrai said he was told it was “only bands” — a reference to the paper band that holds a stack of bills together — followed by the version of the N-word that ends in “a.”

Everything changed for Brandon and Syenrai in the middle of 2020. A mutual friend named Abu “learned how to ban and showed it to me and Brandon,” Syenrai said. Syenrai caught on so well that he earned a measure of fame in 2021 by “memorializing” the account of Instagram head Adam Mosseri. When an account owner dies, Instagram can enable a memorial setting that locks the account and informs viewers that the person is dead. Mosseri’s memorializing only lasted an hour, but it embarrassed the company.

“It was a wild transition for us guys, from playing games to taking down celeb pages,” Syenrai said.

That kind of high-profile takedown is a way for a banner to gain clout, a flexing of skills to showcase Instagram’s vulnerability and make fellow banners jealous — like OBN, who also took credit for memorializing Mosseri.

It was also a quick route to a stern warning.

Syenrai received a cease-and-desist notice from Meta in November 2021. He said he stopped banning and working with OBN.

Kay Jenkins’ Instagram popularity helped her earn between $15,000 and $20,000 a month from sponsorships and OnlyFans subscriptions. But after she moved to Miami from her native Utah in March 2021, both her main Instagram account and her secondary accounts for her real estate and personal coaching businesses were repeatedly suspended. Months later, she learned by chance what had happened. In November 2021, she was a guest on “Fresh & Fit,” along with Celina Powell. Powell, who rose to fame by claiming to have slept with rappers and discussing the alleged affairs on hip-hop podcasts such as “No Jumper,” had recently given a shoutout to OBN.

“I’m telling you right now if you need any Instagram services, you need your account back, whatever the fuck you need, you have to go to my boy @obn.here,” Powell had said in an Instagram video that OBN shared in his channel.

Instagram influencer Celina Powell gave at least two shoutouts to OBN. (Obtained by ProPublica)

After the broadcast, Powell and Jenkins rode the elevator from the studio up to Jenkins’ apartment. Powell called someone she referred to as Brandon and started talking about banning accounts.

“Who is this guy?” Jenkins asked her. “Can he bring my account back?”

“Yeah, he can bring it back if I tell him to,” Powell said. “Because he’s the one who shut it down.”

Powell explained that she had OBN ban Jenkins. Powell was upset after seeing a video of her then-boyfriend dancing with Jenkins at a Miami club, Jenkins said.

Jenkins hid her anger. “I was so hopeful that like, OK, if she’s the source that brought it down, she’s probably my only hope to fucking get it back,” Jenkins said.

Powell agreed to get OBN to restore Jenkins’ accounts. And soon they were reactivated. On Dec. 5, less than a week after the “Fresh & Fit” appearance, Powell posted another shoutout for OBN.

Still furious at Powell, Jenkins ended their friendship. Her main account promptly went down again.

Jenkins finished 2021 with her main Instagram account suspended and no indication from Meta about if or when it might come back.

“I had the worst Christmas of my life, I contemplated slitting my wrists, I didn’t feel like living anymore,” Jenkins said.

Powell was imprisoned in June 2022 for violating parole on a 2015 conviction for driving a getaway car in a theft. Powell, who was recently released, declined to comment. Around the time of Powell’s re-arrest, Jenkins’ Instagram account was restored. But the reprieve was short-lived. On Sept. 23, OBN messaged Jenkins. He offered to get her account verified for a fee. She declined and told him not to contact her again.

“Dumb ass b!tch,” read a private Instagram message sent to her the next day from an account linked to OBN. “I’m going to ruin you.”

Two days later, Meta suspended Jenkins’ account.

Jenkins says that OBN scammed her out of more than $10,000. (Kendrick Brinson, special to ProPublica)

Jenkins decided the only way to protect her account and income was to make peace with OBN. It proved to be an expensive decision.

OBN assured Jenkins that he would be happy to work with her. He told her that he had a senior-level Instagram contact in Europe who could help unban and verify her account. He shared a screenshot of a conversation with the contact but, in an apparent oversight, failed to fully redact the name, according to Jenkins.

Seeing no alternative, Jenkins paid OBN $5,000, receipts show. Her account briefly came back online but was soon taken down by Meta. Then OBN blocked her on Telegram and deleted their conversation, according to Jenkins. She decided she had one more option: go directly to OBN’s high-level connection at Instagram. She found the employee’s Telegram account, which had the same username, photo and bio as his verified Instagram account. She messaged the account to say that she’d been working with OBN but he failed to deliver the services promised.

The response was sympathetic: “We made insane money no clue what went wrong.” They struck an agreement to reactivate and verify Jenkins’ account for $4,000. She sent the money, and her account was unlocked on Nov. 18, but it was suspended again four days later; the contact demanded another $4,000 to fix it. Again, Jenkins sent the money.

An excerpt from a Telegram chat between Jenkins and someone she thought was a Meta employee about getting her account restored (Obtained by ProPublica)

On the morning of Nov. 24, she woke up and immediately checked Instagram to see if her account was back. It wasn’t. And she had a new Telegram message from OBN.

“Haha ur talking to my rep such a slut 🤣 he won’t help you for shit anymore I’ll make sure of that,” OBN wrote.

Jenkins’ account never came back. She hired a lawyer and sent Meta a demand letter for $25,000 in damages for the repeated loss of her main Instagram account. Meta hasn’t replied. In reality, Jenkins was paying OBN all along. In an elaborate scam, he had posed on Telegram as the Meta employee. The cryptocurrency wallet to which Jenkins sent payments matched a wallet that OBN has used for other transactions.

ProPublica also traced the IP address of the server that the alleged Meta employee used to access the internet. It wasn’t in Europe. It was used by a cellphone in Las Vegas.

Meta acknowledged that its employee was impersonated. As a result, the employee and his family have faced threats and harassment for years. The employee reported the account to Telegram. After being contacted by ProPublica, Telegram removed the account, which a spokesperson described as “fraudulent.”

Following Reyes-Martinez’s conversation with a ProPublica reporter in his North Las Vegas apartment, the @madetoomuchmoney Instagram account he said belonged to “Brandon” was deactivated. OBN blocked the reporter from his Twitter account and Telegram channel and announced he would no longer offer account banning as a service.

“I’m done with banning if you mention anything about bans I’ll block you,” OBN wrote to his followers.

But he wanted people to know he was still in business.

“Only doing instagram claims & verification, and C&Ds only for high paying nothing less let’s work 🙏.”

This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.