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Comment by president | Hacker News Reader

> This is how it works: someone working at facebook is taking bribes in exchange for the blue mark, a middle man will take your money (anywhere between $1000 and $15000 dollars, depending on your stupidity) and the friend at fb will submit an application for you to be verified. Hopefully it will be approved.

This is interesting if true

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Those seem like really low figures for bribes considering the average salary of a facebook employee.

"someone working at facebook" probably isn't an employee, most likely anything requiring case by case human discretion is a contractor position that pays shit.

On the other hand, this seems like a way to legitimately take your instagram career to the next level! Networking is about who you know, not about how many people you know. Knowing a Facebook verification contractor is some pretty ironclad social proof.

Yeah, I was thinking the same: most human-scalable data entry ops, like application review, is farmed out to contractors.

That said, there's no guarantee that the contractor will be assigned your application to review. Assuming there are bribes, it likely would involve multiple people which increases it's chances of being revealed and less likely to actually be happening.

Maybe not for someone in customer support, though.

If your expenses equal or exceed your income, even at Facebook salary, an extra $3,000 can be crucial to keeping up the appearance of financial success.

It's pretty common for bribes to be pretty cheap compared to the gain. Same in DC. The ROI for lobbying is enormous. Spend a few million to get billions in subsidies or tax cuts.

grandparent wasn't referring to ROI of the bribe.

Exactly and the simple reason why, which keeps these basic economics of bribery working so robustly, is the asymmetric measures of value/cost inherent to the two sides of the equation. A government or facebook employee or whomever who has access to some lever worth a great deal will sell access to it for these fairly small sums exactly because the much greater value isn't actually a cost to them. They're leveraging their access to someone elses resources for personal acquisition of a much smaller but to them worthwhile gain. You'd never convince a billionaire to sell you access to something of theirs worth billions by paying them only millions, but, like you said, you can easily convince a senator to give you access to billions in government resources (tax money) for a few million to their personal campaign.

(1000 to 15000) times n, where n may not be insignificant. And realistically the risk is low because the cost to Facebook for a review is low.

Repeat business.

It's a 100% true, I've seen some youtubers talk about all the nitty-gritty of the Instagram world and this was mentioned.

I wonder if it's just an employee filling in a form with their name on it or just some Dev flipping a bool on the backend though. If the former, it does sound risky if Facebook ever gets tired of the corruption and starts investigating.

Just today, I saw a a bunch of comments on an Insta page about selling blue ticks. I reported all of them as scam. Would be interesting to see, if Instagram responds with the de-facto "Doesn't violate community guidelines".

Of course they will. I’ve flagged actually illegal content on Facebook and got that kind of response. I mean, there are card fraud groups operating on there right now and nasty teenagers flipping stolen bikes on Instagram Live so why am I even surprised?

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