instagram It is one of the most popular social networks and with the most users today, with millions and millions of users. instagramers uploading and sharing your photographs daily. But also It is one of the favorite targets of hackers and identity theft, which attack accounts (famous or not) to take control of them and carry out all kinds of actions that have nothing to do with the normal activity of said users. Therefore, we offer you a series of tips and actions that we can take to recover our Instagram if our account has been stolen and our identity has been impersonated after trying to access it without success.
How to recover a stolen Instagram profile
If we try to access our Instagram account as always and we see that we are prevented from accessing it using the usual password, we have a problem. Someone has probably managed to access our account and changed our login credentials, preventing us from using our own account. It is even likely that they have changed the profile name and/or contact email. In the case of Instagram, the situation is especially worrying, since a stranger now has access to all our personal photos. So, What can we do to recover our Instagram account?
Report fake Instagram profile
The first thing we should do when we cannot access Instagram is report the fake profile through our contacts. If you have many followers, it is best to communicate the situation through other social networks such as Twitter either Facebook and ask other people to report your hacked profile to the Instagram service itself, through the form specific.
Contact Instagram Support
Next we must contact Instagram support, available through this link. This form asks us for our personal data, in order to receive an email to our personal email to verify our identity using a code and sending a photograph of us with the following requirements:
- Include the provided code, handwritten on a clean sheet of paper, along with your full name and username.
- Includes the hand holding the blade and your face.
- The photograph must be well lit and not blurry.
- The image must be in JPEG format.
It is essential that our Instagram account show at least one photo of us to verify that we are really the real user. Once we have sent the photograph and all our data, we must wait a maximum of 24 hours to check if Instagram has really recovered our account. That's when we have to make sure that our account is deactivated on all our devices, such as mobiles, tablets, computers… Once everything is deactivated, we must press the link sent to us from Instagram to recover our account permanently. Finally, we will have to rewrite our real data in the account if the person who has impersonated our identity has changed them.
How to prevent hacking of our Instagram account
Follow our Tips to prevent hacking or phishing of your Instagram account and other similar applications or social networks:
- The first thing we need to do is activate two-step verification, which will make the identity theft process extremely difficult for hackers.
- We must use a password that is as complex as possible; An optimal password for security should contain letters, numbers and symbols like “?=-” and that we do not use on any other website.
- Make sure you log out of Instagram when using it on devices or computers with access to other people; When you finish, close the browser or application.
- Don't share your login details with third parties or people you don't trust, and change your passwords regularly, especially if Instagram asks you to verify your password.
- Finally, make sure your email account is properly protected; It's possible that a person who can read your emails can also access your Instagram account.
