Anyone can file a copyright complaint against your account, and nobody checks first

Filing a copyright complaint against an Instagram account costs nothing and proves nothing. Meta does not check, at the moment a complaint arrives, whether the person making it owns anything at all. A BBC investigation published this week shows what happens once people work out that a complaint is a weapon.

Collect enough strikes and Instagram removes the posts, suspends the account, or cuts off its ability to earn. So the extortion writes itself: file a batch of claims, wait for the account to go dark, then make contact on Telegram. The creator behind Lost in Time History, an account with 1.5 million followers, told the BBC he has had dozens of obviously fake complaints this year, often several at once and often from the same email address. He eventually paid one extorter $50 in cryptocurrency, not because he thought it was right but because Meta's appeal process can run for weeks and his account was already down. The claims were withdrawn. Fresh strikes arrived almost immediately, and he lost monetisation anyway.

This is not one opportunist. The Delhi High Court has been hearing a case built on the same pattern and in July ordered Meta to hand over subscriber details behind an extortion campaign; in one instance the company accepted that 13 strikes against a single user were fraudulent. After the BBC put examples to Meta, it said it had restored the affected content and applied extra protections to those accounts.

If it lands on you, the useful moves are dull ones. Appeal inside the app rather than through any link in an email, because messages dressed up as copyright notices are a standard phishing lure in their own right. Screenshot every claim with its date before anything vanishes. Do not pay, since the one documented payment bought nothing but a short pause. And keep the email address your Instagram account recovers through properly locked down, because that is the door every other recovery swings on. Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check lists the accounts your PC is signed into and how each one is protected, which is a fast way to spot the ones still resting on a password alone.