Any hope to recover my username?

I have a 9 year old account that I’ve grown from 0 to 1.5m followers. It got hacked back in 2016. My username was stolen and placed on a burner account and it’s still there to this day. That burner account has been inactive for almost 6 years now.

Back in 2016, Instagram support actually existed. I had a very long email chain with their support team as we worked to recover the account. All of these emails are still saved and are direct proof that I am the rightful owner of the username.

So where do I start?

One way would be to trademark that name in your country.
And then contact Instagram. This has quite a high success rate.
I personally have done it twice with success.

have you actually contacted insta support yet and
explained your situation ?

wooderson197 said:

One way would be to trademark that name in your country.
And then contact Instagram. This has quite a high success rate.
I personally have done it twice with success.

Click to expand...

This is a good method. Liveoverflow (a popular security channel on youtube) did the same thing. Here's the video of him explaining the method in detail:


P.s. although it is a "hacking" channel, this particular video has nothing to do with hacking. Even then, if it violates any of the BHW T&C, please feel free to take it off.