How to Recover a Disabled Instagram Account in 2024

Introduction

Welcome to my latest LinkedIn article! I'm Amna, the team lead at Maximatic Media, a boutique digital agency. We've recently expanded our services to include Instagram account recovery services, assisting individuals and brands in regaining access to their accounts following malicious hacks or platform-imposed bans.

As the digital landscape evolves, so does the complexity of managing social media accounts. Whether due to hacking incidents or compliance issues leading to disabled or banned accounts, the need for effective recovery strategies has never been more critical. In this article, I aim to shed light on various effective (and some less effective) methods of Instagram account recovery.

We've successfully utilized several techniques to overturn different types of bans on behalf of our clients and I'm here to share three of those methods. The goal is to provide you with insights and actionable steps that can help protect your digital presence on platforms as influential as Instagram.

This discussion is meant to serve as a comprehensive guide to navigating the challenges of account recovery. Whether you're looking to understand the basics or dive deeper into advanced strategies, this article should serve as a valuable resource. I encourage you to share your own experiences and insights, as your contributions are invaluable to enriching this discussion.

Support Form Botting

Now let’s start off with what’s likely the most common and rudimentary method of recovery - the ol’ support form botting. This method essentially entails spamming the hell out of appeal forms using an automated script in an attempt to bring your account to the top of the queue each time. Most service providers that charge in the range of $300 - $600 for recoveries are generally the ones that utilize this particular approach. It’s significantly more effective than submitting the forms by hand like most people do; however, it can still take months for this approach to pan out. The success rate with this method ranges in the 30-40% range on average, with a slightly higher rate for accounts that were banned within the last 30 days. The date of ban is actually a significant factor in each of the methods we’ll be covering so if you are currently facing a ban, keep in mind that the sooner you act, the better your chances of resolving it favorably.

This method tends to have a 30-40% success rate with all the basic bans such as nudity/solicitation, impersonation, artificial/third-party tool usage, ToS violation, Hate Speech, etc. It will NOT work for copyright, counterfeit or permanently banned accounts. Resolving counterfeit or copyright banned accounts will require Media Partner involvement which is a method we’ll be covering later in the post.

Creator Support Portal

This so-called method is referred to as the Creator Support Portal recovery. A Creator Portal is a Meta-issued creative partnership given to digital creators in which they essentially verify their identity, prove some semblance of notability and enter a formal partnership with Meta, giving them access to a variety of tools and forms they can use to file requests. One of those aforementioned requests is recovering an account in the event of a hack or an unwarranted ban such as false impersonation. Unfortunately, this method isn’t accessible for many as it’s more of a preventative measure one takes in anticipation of its occurrence. If you’ve already been locked out of your account without a valid Creator portal tied to it, creating one on the spot is basically impossible since you are now incapable of linking it to your Instagram.

This method has a respectable 80-85% recovery rate for all the previously aforementioned “basic” bans and a 15-20% recovery rate for copyright infringement bans or the sale of counterfeit goods. It is incapable of processing requests on behalf of permanently banned accounts just like all the other methods in this list. On the off chance that you are currently reading this post with your account still in-tact, it is highly recommended that you look into the Creator Partnership program now to mitigate the contingency of having to spend a good bit of money recovering your account from an unjustified ban.

Media Partner Support Portal

In the event you were unlucky enough to have gotten banned without a Creator Portal within your reach, this is where secondary, more expensive options such as Media and Agency Partner portals come in. Such creative partners have access to custom assigned Meta reps and are able to file claims and requests on behalf of their clientele (unlike Creator portals which can only file claims on behalf of the holder of the portal). These were most commonly used for submitting verification requests prior to the roll-out of “Meta verified” subscriptions and a lot of the partners are now pivoting to using their available requests for services such as account recoveries and username claims. These creative partners have usually received this privilege through spending an undisclosed sum of money on Meta ads and have basically bought their way up the shitty Meta support food-chain.

It has a slightly higher rate of recovery for all the basic bans than a Creator Portal (90% success rate) but can also handle requests on behalf of accounts that were banned for copyright and counterfeits at a 60-70% success rate. The date of the ban also plays a large role in its recovery meaning the longer the account remains in its banned state, the tougher it will be to recover it. For hacked account recoveries, access to the OG email (email used to first register the account) is essential to the process. In the event the hacker has changed all of the 2FA options, it is one of the only ways you are able to prove ownership of the account. This is largely why when you purchase large Instagram accounts for marketing purposes, the account will always come with its OG email in order to ensure it cannot be pulled back by the seller in the future. Additional information such as suspicious log-in locks and emails of 2FA option changes will also sometimes be requested. In some very rare cases, IDs and Articles of Formation/Incorporation may be requested by the rep but this will only occur if the victim doesn’t have access to their original email address.

This service can get quite pricey, often sporting a three-to-four figure price tag, especially when dealing with accounts that have remained in their banned state for years. We’ve been offering this method of recovery from anywhere between $3,000 to $8,000 to our clients depending on the the date of ban, type of ban and # of followers. It is most popular amongst our OnlyFans clientele because it tends to have a high rate of success and is resolved within 2-3 business days of being submitted to the rep. For copyright related bans where several submissions may be required to resolve the infringement notice, expect the pricing to fluctuate depending on the scenario.

Permanently Banned Account Recoveries (Perma-Ban)

To finish off this post, let’s discuss perma-banned accounts. Most recovery service providers will likely tell you that these bans are impossible to recover from and to a certain extent, they are correct. Meta offers no legitimate support channels through which a perma-banned account can be reactivated. However, similarly to what occurred during the Fake Musician Verification craze in late 2022, a select few “rogue” reps and employees do offer permanently banned account reactivation for five figure sums.

However, this method carries a substantially higher degree of risk because it is an unsanctioned action on behalf of the rep or employee. If said Meta representative continues to execute unsanctioned actions and eventually gets caught like they did in the fake musician verification craze, there’s a very good chance that all of their actions will be reversed and whatever sum of money that was paid for them to recover the account would be gone forever along with the account.

That’s why we tend to refuse to process most cases relating to permanently banned accounts as the risk/reward ratio on these cases is far too off-balanced to be worth it, both for us and the client.

Conclusion

As we’re coming towards the end of this write-up, I hope y’all have learned something new about recovering your disabled IG accounts. If you want to share methods that we’ve yet to cover or would like to add on to one of the listed methods above, please do not hesitate to do so. If you are currently facing one of the common bans I’ve listed within this post and would like to recruit our help in recovering it, feel free to send an email to [email protected] or submit the contact form on our site for a feasibility analysis. Thanks for reading!

EDIT (05/04/24):

Given how much this community has grown over the last couple of months, I felt it was fitting to come back here and answer some of the more common questions that myself and my team member Marcus have seen pop up over and over again.

The first thing that I'd like to address is that the vast majority of the people that message us to enquire about their account's recovery are dealing with permanent bans. If you log into your account and find that below the "What This Means" section, it says "you cannot request another review of this decision", you are officially dealing with a permanently disabled account.

Whenever we notify our clients of this fact, many of them are surpised by this notion, firmly believing that they never filed an appeal previously. How the automated appeal system works is really quite straightforward. When your account first gets suspended, you will be presented with a suspension screen saying "we suspended your account for xyz, you have xyz amount of days to disagree with this decision". At the very bottom of that screen, you will find a blue button labeled as "Disagree with decision". As soon as you click that button, you are essentially submitting an appeal. That appeal, however, is algorithmically generated and is almost always going to lead to a permanent disablement of your account. That is why if your plan is to utilize support forms, to never, ever click that blue button, no matter how enticing it may look. Once you click it, it will auto-submit an appeal with almost zero context and there's an overwhelming chance that your account will end up receiving a permanent ban after Meta's automated system reviews it. The best course of action in this scenario is to submit an appeal through the following form:

https://help.instagram.com/contact/1784471218363829

This form gives you the opportunity to submit an appeal with a much higher degree of context than what the in-app appeal process will grant you. It's generally what most of the cheaper "unban" service providers use when submitting appeals on behalf of clients. HOWEVER, this form will not help you if you:

(1) Have already filed an appeal through the app and are stuck in a 24 hour review process (which if lasting for more than a day typically means the account has already been internally permed)

(2) Have already received a ruling on your in-app appeal which was ultimately escalated into a permanent ban

Once you receive a permanent ban on your account, no support form will help you beyond that point. Not even Meta-sanctioned business or media portal reps can overturn that decision, only the so-called "rogue" ones. That's why we always stress to never file an appeal through the app for this very reason as recovery becomes excruciatingly difficult once it veers into the perm territory. As always, if you need some form of professional guidance as far as your account’s recovery status is concerned, please feel free to submit the form on our Instagram banned recovery service page and we’ll get back to you on your case’s eligibility and quote. Thanks again for reading!