Scam Instagram Accounts (and how to avoid them)

If you’ve been on social media for some time, you may have seen the repost accounts with mega followings. Some have an audience in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, and every photo posted gets a ton of comments and engagement.

But have you ever gotten one of those comments or direct messages where a repost-like account is offering to share your image, often for a small price? These kinds of offers usually are backed up with claims of having big followings, a lot of engagement, and therefore more of an audience will find out about you and your account. Sounds great, right?

Wrong.

Often, these types of accounts that are charging you are using bot followers and likes to make it *appear* as if they have a large, genuine audience. But if you do just a quick glance through their followers, many will have no profile image, followers, or posts… a dead giveaway. And when a LOT of those look suspicious in the first handful you see, then the account is likely a scam. Another giveaway is when a post goes up, gets 20 likes with a following of 150k, then out of nowhere gets 3k likes, then no additional likes or comments. This is a giveaway that the account is using bot likes.

Also, a lot of the genuine reposting sites won’t charge you for sharing your work. They will send a message, confirm your OK with it, and share, giving you credit. Be very wary of pushy messages demanding a PayPal payment or else your work won’t get seen by their audience of millions. Until Instagram takes a more proactive approach to shutting these accounts down, we as users need to stick together to warn others to prevent them from getting scammed.

My hope with writing this is that if you happen to get a message like this, then you will know to take a moment to check and see if it actually seems legitimate. Many times, they’re not. Save the $40 or $50 or however much they are requesting and put that into genuine Instagram promotions and you will see substantially better results. Sometimes too, disputing a payment on PayPal won’t get you your money back. If there’s a workaround, I will update this post with the foolproof method to beat the scammers.

Bottom line – do not give a cent to them! And if you want to join the chorus of people fighting these people who are taking advantage of users, please report accounts that message you as spam and warn anyone else that asks you.

Here’s a few scam accounts as examples:

1. wow_destinations, Instagram
2. wowplacestogo, Instagram
3. yourtravelblog, Instagram

Stay vigilant! And let your work speak for itself, don’t let these scammers take advantage of you.

Best,

Brian