The original owner of @N still hasn’t got his Twitter account back – someone else snapped it up

A day after details of Naoki Hiroshima’s worryingly tale of being hacked emerged, and the Echofon developer still doesn’t have his @N Twitter account back — in fact, it has actually fallen into the hands of someone else, someone who is neither Hiroshima nor the hacker that repossessed it.

Twitter locked down and removed the account as word of Hiroshima’s story circulated, and it looked like he would get his account back soon — though the fact that he willingly gave it is likely to have complicated things, as TechCrunch explains.

Things took a turn for the unexpected, however, when an opportunistic individual swooped to pick up the desirably short handle — which Hiroshima says he was once offered $50,000 for — once it was available, leaving Hiroshima understandably confused and frustrated.

It seems that Twitter simply ignored my claim and let somebody grab @N freely. Seriously?

— Naoki Hiroshima (@N_is_stolen) January 30, 2014

We reached out to Twitter to get further clarification about what is going on.

We suspect that the company will sort things out once it realizes that yet another third-party is in possession of the handle, but the process is certainly a lot messier than it needed to be. It would certainly seem to be in Twitter’s best interest to implement a system for this kind of situation — particularly since others have spoken up about attempts made to hack their accounts.

As for the account itself — it’s not clear who the new owner is. It seems unlikely that it is the original hacker, but, at this point in this crazy story, anything seems possible.

Headline image via DAMIEN MEYER/AFP/Getty Images