Scammers are abusing Instagram's protections against self-harm and impersonation to purposefully target and ban Instagram accounts, some charging $60 per ban
An underground industry is abusing Instagram's mechanisms for removing self-injury and impersonating content to censor and harass people. Tweets: @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @audreyjcarleton , @josephfcox , @lorenzofb , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @vice , @josephfcox , @motherboard , @josephfcox , @bigblackjacobin , @josephfcox , and @hypervisible Tweets: Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : New: inside the underground industry of banning-as-a-service on Instagram. Pay $60, you can ban a target's account. Works by exploiting Instragram's mechanisms for impersonation and self-injury content. “Maybe it is their ex or [..] a grudge,” banner said https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : These Instagram ban services, or just how easy the process is in general, lets aattackers “censor at will” on Instagram https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Audrey Carleton / @audreyjcarleton : truly wild report on instagram banning services https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Here is one of multiple services offering Instagram banning. Some are as cheap as ~$5. Depends on the follower count. Interesting, the services say a target must have a human in the profile photo https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / @lorenzofb : For $60, this service promises to ban anyone you want on Instagram. Scam relies onabusing Instagram's protections against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation. https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : But in some cases, it appears the people who are launching banning attacks are the same as, or at least connected to, the people who then offer to restore the account. A protection racket, basically https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : That's because, in at least some cases, the professional banners are abusing Instagram's impersonation protections. One banner told me they use their verified accounts, change profile image to target, etc, then report. “Boom, they are gone,” one said https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... @vice : An underground industry is abusing Instagram's mechanisms for removing self-injury and impersonating content to censor and harass people. https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : After someone is maliciously banned from Instagram, there are people/other services that will offer to help get your account restored. They charge hundreds or thousands of dollars though for a process that individual users can sometimes just do themselves https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... @motherboard : In some cases, the same scammers who offer ban-as-a-service also offer (or are connected to) services that restore banned Instagram accounts, sometimes for thousands of dollars. https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : And if you don't want to pay a service to ban an Instagram account for you, there are also the many scripts available online that you can just run and mass report an account yourself. Also job listing where someone asks for the coding of a mass reporter https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Edward Ongweso Jr / @bigblackjacobin : It really is wild how easy it is to access this, or make it, or build an entire scheme around it...all while the platforms seem to do pretty much nothing to stop you at any step of the process https://www.vice.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Some banners are reporting targets under self-injury and suicide too. This happened to one target who reached out. Their account is constantly up and down; showed screenshots of their account being reported https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Hypervisible Dot Pdf / @hypervisible : Did Instagram say they were sorry yet? 🙄 https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram's moderation systems have become a weapon. As Joseph Cox and colleagues report, an underground 'banning-as-a-service' market sells account removals at roughly $60 a pop by abusing the platform's own protections — impersonation and self-injury reporting flows — with public scripts and job listings powering mass reports.
The story sits in a longer arc of Instagram's gray-market abuse: platforms had already moved on fake-follower and spam services advertised on Instagram, and in February 2021 Facebook and peers seized hundreds of accounts from hijacking forum OGUsers. Banning-for-hire is the next stage — turning enforcement itself into a product.
First-order effects
- Targets lose their accounts to coordinated false reports exploiting impersonation and self-harm safeguards, with some buyers paying $60 per ban; victims face removal with no wrongdoing of their own.
- The same operators sell restoration, charging hundreds to thousands of dollars to reactivate banned accounts — converting Instagram's appeals process into a protection racket.
Second-order effects
- Influencers, whose income depends on their accounts, become paying customers of the very scammers attacking them — a market where being targeted and buying safety are the same business.
- Instagram must harden its reporting flows without weakening legitimate self-harm and impersonation protections, since every tightening that slows real moderation also raises the cost of the abuse it was built for.
Third-order effects
- When moderation tooling is cheap enough to weaponize, trust signals like verification badges and priority reporting become attack surfaces rather than safeguards — pushing platforms toward identity-verified reporting and appeal processes that raise the cost of false reports.
- The pattern holds beyond this case: later reporting on prolific scammer OBNBrandon and the booming influencer-banning community suggests ban-and-extort operations scale wherever platform enforcement can be triggered en masse, likely forcing regulators to treat moderation integrity as a consumer-protection issue.
The trend: Platform trust-and-safety mechanisms are becoming a monetizable attack surface, as enforcement workflows designed to protect users are repurposed into paid censorship and extortion markets.