Pinterest starts blocking hacked accounts, investigates

Pinterest spam and scams are nothing new. Spammers usually use newly created accounts to do it, and Pinterest scam toolkits have surfaced to help them in their efforts.

But it seems that creating new accounts might be a more time-consuming task that hijacking existing ones, especially when such a huge amount of various login credentials is leaked online almost daily and users’ unfortunate tendency to recycle passwords for different online accounts.

Josh Davis of LLsocial.com noticed that account hacking has become a considerable problem for Pinterest users in the last few weeks, and that the website reacted by temporarily locking accounts behaving suspiciously:

“If your account is locked, we will log off all users and send you an email with instructions to create a new password,” Pinterest says to its users. “We understand that it’s frustrating to lose access to your pins and we’re working to get you pinning again as soon as possible – thank you for your patience.”

Pinterest has also set up an online survey for the owners of the hijacked accounts to fill out in order to find the underlying cause of the account hijackings.

Hijacked accounts are being filled with boards with names such as “”Products that I love” and “Must have” and pins leading to scams and sometimes even malware.

Affected users theorize about a possible breach of Pinterest’s user databases, especially because oftentimes changing their password doesn’t help with getting their accounts back into their hands, but at this point in time, it’s difficult to tell what exactly is happening.

Pinterest is yet to comment on the findings (if any) of the aforementioned survey and on the situation.