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Someone stole my Instagram username

22 points by waqasaday ↗ HN
I was @onemorething on Instagram and then suddenly one day I found that my username has been changed to @_onemorething__ and someone else now has my old username.

I reached out to IG support team several times over the course of past 4 months through (my account was hacked form) but they failed to acknowledge the issue and just suggested that I change my password and use a more secure password.

Even though their support <a href="https://help.instagram.com/149494825257596?helpref=search&sr=2&query=hacked%20username">article</a> clearly mentions that you can use the (mentioned) steps to report if your username/email was changed in the process.

Would appreciate any help, on how to contact IG support team to get the issue solved. Thanks.

7 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] thread
pawal
Nothing is going to happen. I have seen this several times now, and support does not lift one finger to give back the account to the original owner. Expect russian spambots to post images in a few weeks time.
exikyut
Unfortunately I can't really comment on this, but would like to add an additional datapoint of someone wanting to know how I can get in touch with IG when I want/need to as well.

In my case, a user's account I was browsing through one day suddenly stopped loading, and when I reloaded the page the account suddenly showed that it had been removed... yet as soon as I logged out (translation: used incognito) it loaded just fine.

Eventually everything fixed itself so this is no longer an active issue, but I always wanted to know what caused my account to be momentarily shadowbanned from accessing that one particular user's account. It was an IG I'd found elsewhere and was just browsing through on the website; besides viewing I didn't interact in any other way at all. Maybe it was that my account has never opened the app, or perhaps that I use the Imagus preview extension which fetches image/video data using the same API calls spammers do...

nwatson
I'd guess more likely that some local in-browser state during your session "flipped" to indicate the target account of interest didn't exist after a failed API interaction or a logic error.

Your short term switch to an incognito tab created a new session without the flaw, making the target account visible.

Your regular-tab interaction eventually refreshed state that made the target account appear.

... that's my attempt at a most plausible explanation, and doesn't involve any purposeful blacklisting of the target account on IG's part.

kuroshit
This also happened to me a year ago. Never contacted IG support over this issue and the most interesting thing was that when I search for the id, it never showed up, so assuming it was not taken and something weird happened, I tried to register a new account with it, but it said it was taken. Now I don't use social media and I'm happy with it.
Jasseni
Good. Tired of seeing owners of good/great usernames, just sitting on inactive accounts.
iliaznk
That's what happens with free services, nothing is actually yours there.
[dead] j1mb0
Boo fucking hoo