Instagram Paid €9K To A 10-Year-Old Hacker Who Said He Could ‘Delete Justin Bieber’

If you count yourself as a bit of a techie fiend, you could be on the road to a big pay-off.

That was the happy reality for one ten-year-old who recently came upon a fairly significant Instagram bug, and took home a large chunk of cash in return.

Instagram paid the Finnish boy a whopping €9,000 when he revealed he’d found a way to delete comments posted by other users. The boy, who Finnish media named only as Jani, demonstrated the bug using a test account created by Finnish paper Iltalehti, but he promised he could do the same for comments posted by big-name users.

“I could eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber,” he told the paper.

The photo sharing site is owned by Facebook, who have a policy of paying users who find significant bugs in their systems. In 2015 alone, Facebook paid out €814,000 in total to 210 users who discovered bugs and security flaws.

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Google have a similar policy – in fact last year they paid researcher Samnay Ved $6,006.13 (€5223), after he revealed he’d been able to purchase the google.com domain online for just $12 (€10.50) when Google’s servers dropped off for a single minute.

Google initially awarded that amount because the numbers 600613 “looked like the letters in Google,” but doubled the fee when Sanmay announced he would donate the amount to charity.

• Facebook
• Google
• hacking
• Instagram