The personal details of some 6 million Instagram users are being offered for sale online as employees of the app maker have been accused of selling account verification.

Revelations that user details from Instagram had been hacked emerged last week, as the Facebook Inc.-owned app maker confirmed that hackers had gained access to user accounts through Instagram’s application program interface. That gave them the ability to steal personal information and control content on the victims’ accounts.

The data stolen did not include user passwords but did include email addresses and phone numbers. That may not be of huge significance to the majority of Instagram users, but celebrity accounts were also accessed, meaning that the hackers had obtained private, not publicly available information.

That very same data has appeared on a site called Doxagram, which is currently available both on the regular Internet as well as the darknet, a shady part of the Net accessed with special software. The site, which requires a registration to enter, allows anyone to search the stolen data for matches and then pay the equivalent of $10 in bitcoin for a single record. According to an advertisement, the site claims sell details of “celebrities, republiKKKans, most influential people’s private information that no one else can get with our service guaranteed!”

SiliconANGLE confirmed that Doxagram was indeed offering private information, with a search on the site finding that the phone number of Kim Kardashian is being offered for sale.

The sale of private Instagram information comes at the same time a report claims that employees at the app maker are offing pay-for-play in terms of account verification. Like Twitter Inc. and Facebook, Instagram allows users of note to obtain a check box next to their names to confirm that the account really belongs to them. The check box is said to be considered a sign of legitimacy for “Instagram influencers,” and those with it can demand higher payments for the content they publish on behalf of advertisers.

According to Mashable, black market middlemen, operating on behalf on Instagram employees, are selling account verification for a fee “anywhere from a bottle of wine to $15,000.” The black market is claimed to have come about because Instagram doesn’t have an open process for verification, instead only internally selecting who gets the check box — creating a system that would appear to be open to corruption.

Photos: daniel-rehn/Flickr, SiliconANGLE/screenshot