Banning racket on Instagram threatening users to ban their accounts

Instagram accounts are being fraudulently disabled : Scammers say they are getting paid to ban users accounts

Demanding money to save and restore user's account

Aurangabad, Oct 4:

Beware of this new scam doing rounds on the internet as scammers have developed a new banning racket. The scammers are threatening the users that they are being paid to ban their accounts and are asking for money to save the account.

Recently the city has been experiencing a lot of cases where Instagram accounts are being falsely reported on large scale by scammers to Instagram. According to experts, impersonation, for instance, is often used to ban one account. The scammers use this mechanism to get someone banned from Instagram by reporting it through various fake profiles. They create fake accounts to look exactly like the target's bio, name, profile photo. Once done, they report the target account for impersonation. Instagram is thus duped to think that the reported account is fake, and it bans it automatically. The real account thus gets suspended. Previously, there was a rise in hacking Instagram accounts through phishing and hacking passwords. These hacked accounts were used to dupe people promising them high returns in very less time and scammed them. Now fake reporting of genuine accounts has increased. According to cyber expert Sahara Syed there is no response from Instagram even after countless requests and e-mails to verify the user.

How does the scam work

According to cyber expert, the scammers seem to be exploiting Instagram’s policies and protection mechanisms against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation. Multiple reports against an account on these grounds ultimately lead to the social media service taking actions against the targeted account. Another way of banning an Instagram account is to mass report it through multiple accounts.