Eight men have been accused of hacking into over 7,500 gig workers’ accounts at Instacart and Target-owned Shipt to defraud the companies of as much as $30 million, according to a search warrant and an indictment reviewed by Forbes.

It’s a rare case showing how gig workers are vulnerable to hacking at scale, which can be damaging for the tech companies who employ them.

In the court documents, filed earlier this month in Ohio and Michigan, the FBI claimed that from 2022 onwards the accused worked together to acquire a stolen list of Instacart and Shipt shoppers who were tasked with buying and delivering items to customers of the two apps. To get into accounts, the defendants posed as Instacart and Shipt employees, contacting the shoppers, some of which were inactive, to ask if they wanted to continue doing deliveries, according to the FBI’s account. The scammers asked the victims to share a one-time passcode to give them access to the account, purportedly to remove their account, reactivate it or to confirm their status as active.

But instead they allegedly used that access for a gift-card fraud scheme. The accused would submit orders........

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