Siew Pui Yi is a Malaysian content creator who has leveraged a massive Instagram following of 18.5M+ followers into everything from cosmetics brands to music. Siew’s career began at the age of 14 when she started working as a model. Enjoying her success as a model but wanting more, Siew joined a talent agency at the age of 18 and found work acting as a host on variety programs, where she would ask people questions on the street or narrate prank videos. The work was good, especially for someone so young, but Siew knew she could do more with herself than voicing YouTube content or chatting with random people. After closely observing the workings of the content-creation industry, Siew began independently producing her own content when she was only 19 years old. Before long, she made the leap to full-time content creation, releasing a line of content based on her modeling work. Initially, she produced both web-based content, such as Instagram photos, and meatspace content, such as books and calendars. Her strategy proved successful, and Siew soon had more than 600,000 Instagram followers. She describes her initial content as “very safe,” saying that she wanted to keep the content very much PG-13 in nature: innocent modeling fun targeted at a broad audience seemed like a great path forward. Until, abruptly, the equation changed.

Malice And Extortion: Siew Pui Yi Is Hacked

As her career began to take off, Siew became the victim of a serious cyberattack. After sending her laptop in for repairs, the machine was hacked, and Siew’s entire web-based identity was stolen. The thieves had access to all of her passwords and also gained access to Siew’s personal photo albums on Google Photos, which included many photos that she did not want to be released to the public. This created an opportunity for the hackers to blackmail Siew; they threatened to release her photos to the public or sell them to nefarious actors on the black market. Terrified, Siew went to the police for help...