A guy was offered £700 for his username on Instagram and he turned it down… initially at least.
I guess when a random person on Instagram offers you money, the immediate reaction is to change all your passwords and hope you haven’t been scammed.
The domain shopper was persistent in his desire to buy the username though, and asked again, offering him nearly £700.
Speaking to UNILAD, Ryan said:
Basically I had had an offer for my username before but when I got asked for an IBAN I didn’t know what it was and thought the woman was trying to steal money off me.
About eight days before I went to New York I realised I had an Instagram message request. I had exchanged how I wanted cash as if you get cash through Paypal they can reverse the transaction.
So the only way would be a bank transfer. It was about two days later I got the message saying he was ready to send the first payment.
I had been out foot-golfing with the guys from college as it was our last week. The signal wasn’t the best but we were on the 3rd hole and I got the mail saying the first payment had been sent.
When I saw I had been transferred £398 I couldn’t believe it! I was running about telling everyone out it in my group chats as no one believed anyone would actually pay me.
Though Ryan wasn’t too savvy when he released his bank details on his Twitter, he did give the guy buying his username details for an account he didn’t use to avoid scamming.
After receiving the first payment, Ryan changed his username and then the mystery username shopper said he would send the second payment of £300.
Ryan continued:
I couldn’t believe it so I made the tweet almost instantly. I thought the tweet would do well. Like maybe 100 favourites or so but I wasn’t expecting it to do so well I actually had to turn my notifications off.
It couldn’t have come at a better time as I was leaving for New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas the following Wednesday.
‘Rydoo’ sounds like some sort of Deliveroo spinoff or something. When Ryan checked straight after handing the domain over to the buyer, it had already been purchased and used by someone else.
The buying and selling of usernames is known as ‘domain flipping’ and is a pretty fruitful side business for many people.
In response to a commenter calling him ‘Jammy’, Ryan said:
Nah had a class username wanted a grand had to settle in the end lol
Ryan uploaded screenshots of his conversation and transaction to Twitter captioned: ‘Just got paid £698 for my insta name’, and it received over 1.1k likes and 7.7k retweets, at the time of writing.
Many commenters pointed out his error in uploading all of his bank details, while one said: ‘watch everybody changing their names to rydoo’.
I’m going to try and think of some sellable usernames now…
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