Investigating Mobile Legends Top Up Fraud on Instagram Using the National Institute of Justice Method

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital technology has increased the occurrence of cybercrime, including fraud through social media platforms. This study investigates a Mobile Legends top-up fraud case carried out via Instagram using the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) digital forensic framework. The NIJ method consists of five stages: identification, collection, examination, analysis, and reporting. The primary data source was an Instagram archive in JSON format obtained through the Download Your Information feature and examined using Oxygen Forensic Detective. Evidence integrity was verified using FTK Imager through hash verification, while Metadata2Go was utilized for metadata analysis. The investigation successfully recovered 51 digital artifacts, comprising 1 Instagram account profile, 3 promotional posts, 2 testimonial highlights, 19 Direct Message (DM) communication threads, and 15 digital transfer receipts, identifying 15 distinct fraud victims. Hash verification yielded 100% match accuracy (MD5 and SHA-1), validating that the evidence remained unaltered. The findings revealed a fraud pattern characterized by payment acceptance without service fulfillment, followed by communication termination. Furthermore, metadata analysis and hash verification confirmed that the digital evidence was authentic, unaltered, and forensically reliable. These results demonstrate that Instagram archive data can serve as valid digital evidence in social media fraud investigations.