Tell HN: Instagram demands I send a picture of myself to prove I own my account
Not to defend the practice (because your case is a false positive for a new account), but rather to speculate on why your account was banned, it's likely due to an increase in impersonation on Instagram recently.<p>In other words, some accounts steal the pictures of real people and then send follow requests to friends, and try to get them to tap on links that can give the bad actor access to the friends' accounts or buy cryptocurrencies. It's been spiking recently over the past couple of months (one case in a Canadian news article at: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/instagram-photos-stolen-scam-1.6464240" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/instagram-photos-sto...</a>), with other prominent cases documented in the past (2019: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-i-stopped-someone-impersonating-me-on-instagram.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/how-i-stopped-someone-impers...</a> and 2021: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/instagram-accounts-created-with-stolen-pics-push-bogus-crypto-schemes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/instagram-accounts-created-w...</a>). Bleeping Computer published a deeper article on the most recent ongoing spike (describing the crypto and Onlyfans scams): <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagrams-dark-side-sexual-harassers-crypto-scammers-id-thieves/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/instagrams-da...</a><p>This doesn't justify at all the permanent deactivation of your completely new account, but just for curiosity's sake, I speculate that this is the reason your new account was banned (overly high security sensitivity on Instagram's end, due to a recent spike in false accounts that impersonate real people, to encourage others to buy cryptocurrency and/or click malicious links).