What to do if someone impersonates your Instagram account!

By Nicole Healy

It was a Wednesday afternoon about two weeks ago, I was in a coaching call when my client said to me, “ oh that’s odd an account just started following me on Instagram, with a similar username to yours” and within the next hour, I had over 50 DM’s from others too asking the same thing.

My heart immediately sunk, oh no! Not again - you see I lost my Instagram account once before in early May of 2021, less than a week after my daughter was born. I was doing an Instagram Story, and was logged out, never to see my account again. I can tell you, it’s a sickening feeling, to think something you’ve worked so hard for was just taken away from, in seconds - without your knowledge!

What had happened just recently - was that someone (a hacker) a created a fake account, pretending to be me, with a bio stating my account had been hacked, and started following people who followed me, trying to get them to unfollow my business account that I use. It such an icky feeling - but lucky for me, my community are smarter than this, they immediately contacted me via my Instagram, Text and Email asking If this was real.

I was so proud of these people, I had taught them well how to spot a fake, but there is still a lot of people out there who can’t. If this happens to you, you can go into your settings on Instagram and report a problem, you’re being impersonated. You’ll need to fill in all your details and also upload a photo of you holding your government approved identification, such as your driver’s license or passport. It took about a week for this impersonation account to be taken down.

After reporting this to Instagram myself and my community reporting this fake account pretending to be me, I called Australian Cyber Security to ask them some questions I had around this happening and also any information I can pass on to my community too, to help them. They were saying to me, these groups are professionals who do this, targeting businesses more and more, and they’re offshore, they could be from countries anywhere around the world, and they target people at random.

It’s becoming more and more common in the online space for impersonators to create these accounts, pretending to be business and phish their community into believing them - and try and scam them.

Instagram has become a breeding ground for these hackers to try and steal information from business & people who use this platform, and what’s really awful, is when people get caught up in this. During lockdowns between 2020 and 2022, it was the biggest influx for people getting these odd DM’s from accounts saying things like “Hey Babe, I need your help” - and this was the start of the hacking.

They would send people links, where they would log into Instagram - and these hackers were literally taking their log in credentials and take over their Instagram’s and furthermore Facebook accounts too, losing their whole social media platform - where this is most businesses get their new customers from, gone in just a few clicks, to never be seen again, unless you know someone at Instagram or Facebook, which is almost impossible for a faceless business - these hackers would send accounts and email straight away saying “You’ve been Hacked”, and asking them to send them a huge amount of bitcoins to retrieve their accounts again.

Just this week, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta announced for Business you will now be able to pay a monthly subscription fee for the blue tick of verification, so this makes it easier for you to be able to contact Meta the home of Facebook and Instagram - with more features around if your account was to be compromised. Australia and New Zealand will the first people to get this feature. Will you be using this? I will. Instagram is where 100% of my business comes from, so it’s an essential part of protecting both my businesses Melbourne Hair Blogger & Social Salon School.

So, here’s some tips to avoid being hacked.

1. Set up two factor authentication on both Facebook & Instagram

2. Have a different email linked to your Instagram account, that’s not visible to the public, for your log in email. You log in email and your public business email should be separate, this makes it harder for anyone to be able to guess your log in details.

3. In your Personal Information in your edit profile on Instagram, make sure the phone number there is a mobile phone number that you have access too, if Instagram need to send you a text message - they will send it to this number. Quite too often I see new clients of mine with a landline here, so make sure you change this to a mobile number you have access too.

4. If you’re not sure if Instagram have sent you an email, go into your Instagram settings, Security and tap on Emails from Instagram - it will show you any email Instagram has sent to you.

5. Don’t click on any links sent to you via DM that say to login to your Instagram or Facebook – even if it looks like it from someone you know, they may have been hacked and they’re trying to get you too.

If you would like to learn more about Social Media for your Salon in 2023 - you can reach me on Instagram @social.salon. school and send me a DM to book a free 15 Minute Discovery call.