Instagram Hacked? How To Recover Your Account

Follow our tips to recover your Instagram profile if your identity has been impersonated.

We at SwipeTown know how difficult it can be to lose your Instagram account, that’s why today we’ll explain how to recover it if it’s hacked.

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks with the most users today, with millions and millions of instagramers uploading and sharing their photos on a daily basis.

But it is also one of the favorite targets of hackers and identity thieves, who attack accounts (famous or not) to take control and perform all kinds of actions that have nothing to do with the normal activity of these users.

Therefore, we offer a series of tips and actions we can take to recover our Instagram if we have stolen the account and have supplanted our identity after trying to access it unsuccessfully.

How to recover a stolen Instagram profile

If we intend to access our Instagram account as usual and see that we are prevented from accessing through the usual password, we have a problem.

Someone has probably managed to access our account and has changed our login credentials, which prevents us from using our own account.

It’s even possible that the profile name and/or contact email have changed. In the case of Instagram, the situation is particularly worrying, as a stranger now has access to all of our personal photos. So what can we do to recover our Instagram account?

Report a false Instagram profile

The first thing we should do when we cannot access Instagram is to report the false profile through our contacts.

If you have many followers, it is best to communicate the situation through other social networks such as Twitter or Facebook and ask other people to report your hacked profile to Instagram’s own service, through the specific form.

Contact the Instagram support service

Then we must contact the Instagram support service, available through this link.

This form asks us for our personal details, so that we can receive an e-mail to our personal e-mail address to verify our identity by means of a code and the sending of a photograph of us with the following requirements:

Include the code provided handwritten and on a clean sheet of paper next to your full name and username.
Include the hand that holds the sheet and your face.
The photograph should be well lit and not blurry.
The image should be in JPEG format.

It is essential that our Instagram account shows at least one of our photographs 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.

Then we must make sure that our account is deactivated in all our devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, computers…

Once everything is deactivated, we must click on the link sent to us from Instagram to recover our account definitively.

Finally, we will have to rewrite our real data in the account if the person who has supplanted 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 to activate two-step verification, which will make it very difficult for hackers to impersonate you.

We must use a password that is as complex as possible; an optimal security password must contain letters, numbers and symbols of the type “¡?=-” that we do not use anywhere else on the Internet.

Make sure you close your Instagram session when using it on devices or computers with access to other people; when you finish close the browser or application.

Do not share your login details with third parties or people you do not trust and change your passwords regularly, especially if Instagram asks you to verify your password.

Finally, make sure that your email account is properly protected; it is possible that a person who can read your emails may also be able to access your Instagram account.

Has your Instagram account been hacked? Share your story with the community and tell us what you did to get it back?

I hope these tips will help you recover your Instagram account. At SwipeTown we know how important your Instagram account is!

Larry O'Connell