Two Instagram accounts staged a public 'hack' story in April 2018

The persona

Bermuda is a fictional Instagram persona who drew wide attention in April 2018 through a storyline aimed at Lil Miquela, the Brud-operated character discussed elsewhere in this site's coverage. Bermuda's own posts present her as affiliated with a rival concern she calls Cain Intelligence, a claim made entirely within her account's own posts and not corroborated here by any document from a company by that name. Whoever writes Bermuda's account controls a persona that, unlike Miquela, has never had its operator identified in the sources reviewed for this entry.

What the documents establish

An archived capture of Bermuda's account, preserved by the Wayback Machine on 19 April 2018, shows a sequence of posts: on 16 April, 'I tried being nice... See you tomorrow, world'; on 18 April, 'On my way to meet the infamous @lilmiquela. Gonna make her tell you guys the truth about what she really is,' followed the same day by 'she said she's going to come clean tomorrow.' A later capture, from 15 May, shows a 20 April post linking to a 'company statement' and stating 'We have absolutely no affiliation with @brud.fyi.' Miquela's own account, archived 8 April, shows her response the same day: 'My managers at @brud.fyi lied to me and now they're lying to you,' and, on 25 April, stress from 'no longer working with my managers at Brud.'

Character versus company

Within the story, Bermuda positions herself as an outsider exposing Brud, while Miquela's posts describe an internal falling-out with her own managers. Both readings are constructed inside the fiction; neither account's posts are a company statement from Brud itself, and no document here is a Brud release confirming who operates Bermuda's account. What is verifiable is narrower than 'a rival company hacked Miquela': two Instagram accounts ran a coordinated, multi-day storyline referencing each other by handle, on a traceable timeline, with Miquela's own posts naming Brud as her operator and Bermuda's posts denying any tie to it.

What to watch

This entry does not resolve whether Bermuda was, in fact, also a Brud production presented as a rival for narrative effect, a question the archived accounts cannot settle since Bermuda's posts affirmatively deny the connection. A reader wanting that answer would need a Brud statement, a filing, or reporting that independently traces Bermuda's account to Brud's operations, none of which is cited here. Treating the storyline as a documented sequence of posts, rather than settled evidence of who deceived whom, is the more defensible reading.

• Is there a Brud statement, filing, or independent report that names Bermuda's actual operator?
• What did the linked 'company statement' page say, and does any archived copy survive beyond Bermuda's own link to it?
• How did outside audiences at the time distinguish this storyline from an actual account-security incident, if at all?

The safest description of April 2018 is a scripted sequence across two accounts, timestamped and cross-referencing each other, rather than a settled account of an actual hack, a distinction the surviving posts support more directly than any claim about who was really behind either handle.