My first piece of advice is to make sure that your Instagram account is set to private. As I showed in my previous post, making your Instagram profile private means that your posts and stories are not shown to everyone. All that is visible is your username, your profile picture, and your biography. If someone would like to follow you they have to send you a request. They do so by clicking the follow button and you see in your heart feed who wants to follow you. From this point on you have complete control over who follows you and who doesn't. My advice is to not accept a follow request from any account that you don't know. All you have to do is decline their request and that's it, they can't follow you. The same is true when someone sends you a direct message. You access your direct messages from the home page - the arrow in the top right. An account that messages you cannot do so easily. They send a message to you but you have to accept it or decline it when your account is private. If your account is public anyone can message you. You access your direct messages from the arrow. Click the arrow in the top right of your home page. You will see a message request. Click this and it will show the profile picture and the message sent. Don't accept it if you don't want to. I regularly just decline messages as I know they are from fake accounts or are scams.
Now I am going to show you other little checks you can do when a strange account requests to follow you. I am going to use my Instagram account profile page again to help me.
1. I don't accept any followers or messages from anyone that doesn't have a proper picture for a profile image.
2. I check the username. Does it go with the picture? Does it match the name given in position 6? I've had scammers using accounts with female usernames with a male image and a male name on the account. I've had usernames that are clearly an African/Indian/Middle Eastern/Asian name with a picture of a man or woman that is not that nationality and with a name under the image that does not match. If any of these are the case I don't accept the follow or message.
3. Check the number of posts made. Then look at some of the posts. When were they posted? When was the first post added? What kinds of posts are being added? You can see when a post was made so if it is just minutes or hours old or even a few days with only a small number of posts added then a red flag is waving for me.
Look at the type of posts being made. Memes, sayings, quotes, schmaltzy romantic stuff waves another red flag.
Check for stolen photos as some leave the Instagram icons on and don't crop them off properly - another red flag. They even leave on the real person's watermarks like their username - an instant report and block for me if I see this.
4. Check the number following them - the smaller the number, a male with a lot of female followers or a female with lots of male followers yet it's a new account then that is a red flag straight away.
5. Check who they are following. If it's a man and they are following a lot of women that look to be a similar profile to you then there's a red flag waving.
Often they have few followers yet they may well be following a big number of people - another red flag for me.
6. Check the posts they are tagged in at position 12. I've seen scammers tagged in to their Nigerian friends' posts. Huge red flag waving.
7. Search for other users with a similar name. Eg you have a request from a frankwilliams20201 (made up username). Search Frank Williams to see how many others there are who are using the same images - there usually are some. If this is the case then it's a red flag.
8. Read their biography at position 6. Does it make sense? Are there a lot of spelling mistakes? Some make such glaring errors that show them up as scammers immediately.
9. Within their biography, you will often find a web address included as a link. Do not click the link. These usually don't work, sometimes they do, but they could be adding malware or spying software onto your device so they can find your bank details, your passwords, etc making you extremely at risk of fraud and theft.
These are just a few basic ways I check out any profile that wants to follow me or send a message, either on my Instascammers profile or my personal one. I get a red flag then I report and block them and I certainly do not let them follow me or send me a message.
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