Got a grudge against an Instagram user? Well, scammers may just have the perfect service for you – at quite an affordable price.

As Joseph Cox at Motherboard reports, the criminal underground has stepped beyond the likes of offering ransomware-as-a-service and DDoS-attacks-for-hire to advertise an easy way for anyone to target an Instagram account and have it banned – for $60 or less.

Motherboard found the ban-as-a-service operations advertised on underground forums, and – according to their investigation – prices can vary depending on the number of followers an Instagram account may have.

So, just how do these professional Instagram banning services work?

One of the main methods appears to be through a bogus impersonation claim. A scammer will duplicate the targeted account, grabbing the profile photograph and description, and post them on a verified account with a blue checkmark.

Then the scammer will lodge a fake impersonation complaint against the genuine account (which does not have a blue checkmark verification), claiming that the real account is an imposter.

Instagram’s support department, in its wisdom, then bans the genuine profile – causing huge headaches for its owner, whether they be an individual or business. Clearly, it would be better if Instagram looked at all the evidence, rather than just whether an account had a checkmark or not.

Another technique used by those operating the Instagram account banning service, according to Motherboard, was to flood the service with bogus claims that a targeted account contains images related to self-harm and suicide.

Clearly, that’s not the type of content that anyone would like to encounter on Instagram, and it’s good to know that the social network’s support team would block accounts that were reported as sharing such material… but it appears that Instagram often disables accounts purely on the basis (Read more...)