Ask HN: Wife's Instagram account was deleted – what now?

I tried to help her find a support ticket, but there is nothing even remotely close to that on "Metas" help page.

Any ideas? Has anyone experienced this before? Are there any Metamates who can help?

This is the email she tried to send them, but it went to void:

"I was on my Instagram page and suddenly got a message on Instagram that I’m logged off. I tried to log in and it said that my account can’t be found. I did not get any email from IG about my account disappearing or it logging out. What can be done in this situation?"

My sister's business account was hacked (phished probably) and was contacted by the scammer asking for money to get the account back. IG's support is practically non-existent and their automated tools don't help at all if the scammer changes the username/email. She got it back a few days later by going through her state's government. Apparently they have contacts at FB/IG/etc to escalate cases affecting businesses based in their state. She got put in contact with this rep through a friend of a friend so I don't know how easy it is to make use of this "resource". You'd think it would be easy for IG to notice that an account being logged in from a new location, username changed, password changed, and email changed is probably a victim but their systems did nothing.

If it's a personal account your best bet is to make noise online, have a friend that works at IG, or do what the other comment here says about contacting IG PMs on Twitter which is a sad state of affairs. Whatever you do DO NOT pay anyone online promising to get the account back. There are plenty of people with "testimonials" of people they have helped, don't fall for it.

Got into the mugshot bot loop for weeks and weeks. Absolutely nothing.

Reached out to Facebook Legal. Nothing.

Ended up ditching Facebook and Instagram. Won't look back.