$50 to get your Instagram back — and the strikes started again the same day
A history page with 1.5 million followers paid a stranger $50 in crypto to lift a fake copyright claim. The account came back. So did the strikes.
Imagine someone you have never met can switch off your income by filling in a form. No proof required, no ID, no check. That is what has been happening to Instagram creators, who told the BBC they lost thousands of pounds after fake copyright complaints got their accounts suspended or taken down.
The people filing the claims then message the victim and ask for money to withdraw them. One creator with 1.5 million followers told the BBC he paid a scammer $50 (£37) to get his account back, because Meta's appeal process would take weeks — and weeks offline had already cost him thousands in lost income.
The trick works because of one design decision: Meta does not check whether a copyright complaint is genuine at the moment it is filed. Enough strikes in a row, and the account goes down. So the claim itself is the weapon — the extortionist does not need to hack anything, guess a password or send a phishing link. They just fill in the form, repeatedly, from the same email address, and then invite you to Telegram to discuss the price.
Olly, who runs the Lost in Time History account and posts historical pictures to more than 1.5 million followers, says he has received dozens of "obviously fake" complaints so far in 2026. He paid $50 in cryptocurrency as a "last resort". More strikes landed immediately after. "Having to pay the person who's actively put you through all of that anguish only for it to happen straight away again," he said. His account ended up demonetised — he could no longer earn from high-performing posts.
Meta only reviewed the cases after a journalist called.
A Meta spokesperson said its systems "are designed to protect people from this happening in the first place", and that after review it restored the affected content and added extra protections. That restoration came after the BBC contacted Meta with examples. Meanwhile the fast lane to a human being costs £9.99 a month — the Verified subscription, which gives 24/7 live chat support. As Abin Tom Sebastian, behind the Morbid Kuriosity account, put it: Meta was "forcing you to pay for support to talk, even as they claim to be here for the creator". He says he lost brand contracts that went to another creator instead.
Anyone whose money arrives through an account rather than a payslip: the 24-year-old doing brand deals from a phone, the person building a page on the side while working full time, the small shop that sells entirely through Instagram DMs. If your rent depends on a login, a stranger with a web form now holds a switch you cannot see. It also touches everyone deciding whether "creator" is a career worth betting on — Olly's page has 1.5 million followers and he still could not get a human at Meta without paying £9.99 a month. And it touches anyone who has ever assumed a complaint system exists to protect them: as one expert told the BBC, the system was built assuming the person making the claim was telling the truth.
Meta says it has "added additional protections" to the affected accounts and that this would prevent similar issues in future. That is the thing to watch and the only measurable promise on the table: whether Olly and the other creators the BBC named get hit again, and whether the protection applies only to them or to everyone. Meta named no deadline, no policy change and no plan to verify claims before they take effect. Nothing in the source says any authority is looking at this.
Three of the people filing these strikes spoke to the BBC. Two said they earn nothing from it. One asked a creator for $900 to withdraw a claim and confirmed he kept all of it. We don't know how many more are doing this — but a copyright expert told the BBC that AI now makes it possible to automate the whole thing at scale. It is, he said, a numbers game. The forms are free. Your account is not.
Sources: BBC News, "Scammers demand ransoms from Instagram users over fake copyright claims", by Imran Rahman-Jones, published 2026.
Любой, у кого есть аккаунт с аудиторией, узнаёт: чужой человек может парой фальшивых жалоб отключить ему доход, а платформа проверит это только после звонка журналистов.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections