Recently malicious people use this method to disable any personal or business account they want. Its very easy. For example you have a 5 year old personal account with 800 followers.
All they have to do is this: Find an older account with more than 10k followers.
And then they change the profile photo and the bio to the exact same of yours and just report your account for impersonating. Thats all. And you are gone. Thats how “serious (!)” and screwed instagram is.
Really? I don’t see how they could do that with a single report… now, maybe if you have 20 people do it the automated system would compare profile/text data, but only for an initial automated deactivation.
It doesn’t make sense that one single report would instantly result in that, especially considering they can see that the reporting account had changed its information from whatever it was previous to the report, as it’s all logged.
But then again nothing surprises me with how mismanaged the platform is these days.
Yes, it was a single report.
IMPORTANT: Not having a profile photo or having a profile photo without a human face is the only way to evade this ban!
That’s just nuts.
Wow. I know in the past people were using impersonation to try to get verified and now I guess people are using it for negative ways…This is just crazy.
I don’t totally agree with this,only one report can’t get you banned unless and until you have breaked their terms and conditions.I agree with the point but not the one report thing and here’s why:-
There are scripts to report people where you can just load your ‘x’ accounts with proxies,select a user and reason and the script will automatically report them.
If only one account could get you banned then these scripts wouldn’t be made as it would have nuo use then.
Seems very unusual as people @ IG can easily see changes made on the profile. Like handle and post & pictures.
But on the other hand, nothing really surprizes me on IG anymore. Sometimes I wonder how the lack of basic security on the platform now a days is even possible.
I mean just to mention one. Gather 100 people or simply ask your friends to report someone you don’t like!
Why does IG immediately ban the accounts instead of giving a warning?
Almost as if they didn’t care about their users…
We have a winner 
Troublemakers scare away the Advertisers. Better not take chances or otherwise, your Ad rev goes down the drain 
Actually, a year ago I had someone “impersonating” me but with a different name, they grabbed about 25 photos, my bio picture, etc. Created the profile and accidentally tagged me in one of the posts during their sloppy attempt to do whatever they were doing.
I reported it, as did a few of my followers at the time, the account was never banned. I don’t remember the name of it anymore, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the account was still up. So I’m not sure if this is the result of new coding or they just went full lunatic mode.
This is ridiculous 
If this is how they are handling these kinds of cases, hopefully, they will get more careful and care more about issues users have.
This.
IG can definitely see when you made changes to the account, so this would only really work if you run into employee who isn’t really being thorough with their job.
The profile photo and bio being changed would be red flags. As another user mentioned, they have scripts out there for mass reporting accounts using multiple accounts and proxies. These scripts wouldn’t exist if only one report was needed.
Maybe one report with additional evidence, but just a profile and bio change seems a bit weak.
Did they not look at the posts at all? I mean even though the bio and the PP are same, but you can tell from the posts which one is fake account. I’ve been wondering how my friend’s account keep getting disabled because of impersonation,
Who the heck knows, they battle “bad things” with coin tosses, have some of the worst content policies, and clearly don’t care about their users.
Using the above example, if true, makes hardly any sense. On the opposite side of that, I just got harassed by some random assclown out of the blue, screaming at me for spamming, cursing me out and calling me names via DM from multiple accounts, someone I had never interacted with or knew anything about. I reported his accounts and messages for harassment and Instagram’s automated response was “This person did nothing wrong,” and that was that, he’s free to go around attacking people.
So you have example A, where just changing your name and reporting someone gets them banned vs example B where you can verbally attack someone with multiple accounts and they’re free to do that.
I guess private actions are fine because you can block them, but public ones, ie. an account that everyone can see is not, because of that reason alone. Maybe. If I can deduct any sort of logic from their braindamaged policies.
Remember, their interests are $$$. Impersonation inquiries defintitely fall in that category, & people do indeed abuse that (to get verified or otherwise).
Imagining here: if some were to do this to me, I’d create a profile to run a $5 ad ( or something with that idea). Then inquire about someone who abused the system to impersonate me & affect my ability to run a campaign on their platform, as their actions got my account disabled.
I imagine that some one will look into this & rectify the damage, since there are direct implications on their ability to receive your investment (Ad revenue)