One guy claims to have made earned over five figures from selling lucrative Instagram bans in just under a month, cautioning that banning “is pretty much a full-time job lol.”
STORY HIGHLIGHTS:
- You can get someone banned from Instagram for around $60
- Scammers also earn money by helping victims regain account access
- Instagram claims it’s investigating sites offering banning services
Instagram scammers get paid for banning people
I could get you banned on Instagram by paying scammers around $60. For that sum, they will first use a verified account and your own bio details and profile image to impersonate you.
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From there, scammers report your own Instagram account as an impersonator, fooling Instagram’s algorithm for detecting impersonated content to wrongly ban you from the service.
Motherboard has the story:
Both listings say that a target account must have a human in the profile photo. In War’s case, they said they ban users by filing a fraudulent impersonation complaint to Instagram. “I use an impersonation method where I get my verified Instagram accounts and change my profile to look exactly like the target’s bio, name, profile photo etc. I report them for impersonation once and boom, they are gone,” War told Motherboard.
Well, that’s an abuse of Instagram’s systems if I ever saw one! Those people don’t stop at banning. They will actually get a victim to pay for restoring their account! One source told Motherboard that the business of banning people is reportedly very lucrative.
War, the pseudonymous user offering the ban service, told Motherboard in a Telegram message that banning “is pretty much a full time job lol.” They claimed to have made over five-figures from selling Instagram bans in under a month.
An Instagram spokesperson told Motherboard that the company is actively investigating accounts and websites that offer these banning services. Instagram’s Help Center, of course, offers instructions on what to do if your account gets banned, hacked or disabled.
But this won’t be a comforting thought at all should you realize one day that your ex had so much grudge with you that they paid a banning service to get your Instagram account disabled.
And just like that—boom, you’re no longer a model, fashionista, fitness trainer or whatever.