Lil Tay Death Hoax Was a Hack As Meta Restores Instagram Account: Report

It’s been a wild five days for one-time online sensation Lil Tay, the 16-year-old Canadian who stormed the internet for a few months in 2017 and 2018 as a profane lover of all things luxury. After a false announcement of her death was posted to her long-dormant Instagram account, skeptics wondered if the hoax was a ploy generated by Tay to return to the spotlight. But the jape was indeed the result of a hack, a spokesperson for Instagram parent company Meta reportedly said this weekend, and now the 3.6 million-follower-strong social media account is back in its owner’s hands.

It all started on August 9, when Tay’s account posted a statement that claimed that Tay and her brother (whose name was not mentioned) had died. “We have no words to express the unbearable loss and indescribable pain,” the post read. “This outcome was entirely unexpected, and has left us all in shock.” Complicating the issue were the words of Tay’s father, Christopher Hope, who, when contacted by Insider, refused to confirm or deny the announcement.

However, skepticism about the death claim grew as Tay’s family remained silent; law enforcement officials in the cities Tay was known to frequent also had no information on her possible death. The day following, Tay herself contacted TMZ to confirm that, as with Mark Twain before her, the report of her and her brother’s passing was untrue.

“I want to make it clear that my brother and I are safe and alive, but I’m completely heartbroken, and struggling to even find the right words to say,” Tay said. “My Instagram account was compromised by a 3rd party and used to spread jarring misinformation and rumors regarding me.”

Perhaps burned by the death announcement—or unconvinced by the claims of a former social media star who has been out of the limelight for several years—some speculated that the false death claim was in support of a cryptocurrency launch, while others alleged that the third party Tay blamed was a myth. “I don’t believe anything that they say about the hacking,” former manager Harry Tsang told Us. 

“It is conceivable that the intention behind these events could be rooted in an endeavor to illicitly extract funds from devoted supporters and unwitting bystanders,” Tsang told Fox News. Also, a possible motive, he said, was to “rekindle Lil Tay’s prominence within the public sphere.”

While the latter certainly happened, as the ubiquity of headlines on the case confirmed, it appears that Tay had indeed lost control of her Instagram account, and that the death announcement was, indeed, the result of a hack. 

So reports TMZ, which says an unnamed spokesperson for Instagram owner Meta confirmed that “Lil Tay is being truthful about not being able to access her IG” and that the company helped “her get her IG back from the hacker.” (Vanity Fair’s request for comment from Meta has not received a response as of publication time.)

Tay “thanked Meta for helping to get her Instagram account back,” TMZ reports, but did not say if she’d resume use of the account. Her Instagram account’s most recent post, published on July 18, 2018, was a memorial to late rapper XXXTentacion, the same day he was fatally shot outside a Florida motorcycle dealership. “As a father figure, when I don’t have one, you were here,” Tay said of XXXTentacion. “I can’t believe this, the evil in the world.”