{"id":131627,"date":"2019-09-14T15:22:38","date_gmt":"2019-09-14T13:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sftarticles.wpenginepowered.com\/en\/?p=131627"},"modified":"2025-07-01T21:31:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T04:31:21","slug":"is-it-illegal-to-buy-and-sell-instagram-accounts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/is-it-illegal-to-buy-and-sell-instagram-accounts\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it illegal to buy and sell Instagram accounts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all know the deal about \/buying\/ Instagram followers. It\u2019s frowned upon, of course, and maybe even a little dangerous. You might get banned from the platform and it could have a negative impact on your reputation.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a whole other Instagram underbelly\u2014the seedy world of flipping generic Instagram accounts.<\/p>\n

The legality of these black market Instagram exchanges is murky at best. Here’s a little more about buying profiles and how it’s not exactly the same as buying followers.<\/p>\n

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Buying Instagram followers vs. buying accounts<\/h2>\n

Brands that buy accounts are trying to jump-start their journey to success. It\u2019s hard to get a social account off the ground and when people see that an account has followers, they\u2019ll be more inclined to follow, too.<\/p>\n

Buying accounts pre-loaded with niche-specific followers is a little sketch, but it doesn’t seem to cause harm on par with the practice of buying followers.<\/p>\n

As a point of reference, we’ll point toward this New York Times article<\/a> that looked closely at a company called Devumi.  Once a go-to source for athletes and celebrities to grow a social following overnight, Devumi advertised their service as “social media amplification.” In this case, customers believed they were paying for an advertising service that helped them get real fans \u2014 though it turned out, they were paying for bots that just looked<\/em> like real people.<\/p>\n

The fake follower racket is well-documented and Instagram takes a hard stance against the practice. But, buying accounts is a bit different. The idea is that you\u2019ll get an account preloaded with followers within your target market and take over \u201clegitimately\u201d from there. Supposedly, the followers of these accounts are real. It seems like most are people who followed some random accounts that align with their interests be it yoga or cars.<\/p>\n

When you buy an account, what you get is a generic account with people that represent your target demographic. From there, you can customize your new account and keep growing your following.<\/p>\n

Instagram says you are not allowed to buy, transfer, or sell any aspect of your Instagram account. This means that there\u2019s a chance Instagram could shut your account down at any time for violating its terms of service agreement.<\/p>\n

How do you buy an Instagram account?<\/h2>\n

So, if you Google buy or sell Instagram accounts, you\u2019ll see that there are a handful of companies that let people purchase Instagram accounts\u2014fully stocked with followers–as if they were a pair of shoes.<\/p>\n

SocialTradia<\/a> is one such example. It\u2019s actually pretty weird to look at the website. For example, the home page looks like an e-commerce shop\u2014where you can buy accounts related to your niche. From there, we presume, you\u2019ll slap your own branding on the accounts and start influencing away.<\/p>\n

SocialTradia allows you to search for accounts by category: think yoga, fashion, or fitness. The accounts cover really broad topics, most with a collection of stock photos that haven\u2019t been edited. They do provide a money-back guarantee, but it\u2019s only good for 24 hours after making the purchase.<\/p>\n

\"buy<\/p>\n

Or, there\u2019s ViralInstas<\/a>, another platform that offers accounts in the modeling, fashion, or animal niches. Follower counts won\u2019t top 15k, which could be a sign that the platform does a decent job keeping fake followers off of the profiles. The accounts come with passwords, a hashtag research tool, and a list of hundreds of hashtags proven successful with the audience.<\/p>\n

Or TooFame<\/a>, another site that promises to provide users with a selection of high-quality accounts with real followers. Here, most accounts hover between 2k and 5k followers and are labeled by niche\u2014fitness, sport, car, weed, are all options on here\u2014and many accounts are marked down.<\/p>\n

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Is it legal to buy an Instagram profile?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s not exactly illegal to buy Instagram accounts\u2014and it\u2019s certainly less of a problem that bot accounts and fake profiles. Instagram might ban your account\u2014so the main concern is, you\u2019ll be out a few hundred bucks, and you might waste some time growing a following \u2014 only to have it taken away.<\/p>\n

The sites that sell Instagram accounts sometimes offer a layer of fraud protection like SocialTradia\u2019s guarantee. Others aren\u2019t such a smart idea.<\/p>\n

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We all know the deal about \/buying\/ Instagram followers. It\u2019s frowned upon, of course, and maybe even a little dangerous. You might get banned from the platform and it could have a negative impact on your reputation. But there\u2019s a whole other Instagram underbelly\u2014the seedy world of flipping generic Instagram accounts. The legality of these … Continue reading “Is it illegal to buy and sell Instagram accounts?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9161,"featured_media":181184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":1},"categories":[2518,2441],"tags":[2354,1051,1035],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[],"class_list":["post-131627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guides","category-how-to","tag-app-subdomain-redirectioninstagram","tag-instagram","tag-social-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325500,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131627\/revisions\/325500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131627"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=131627"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=131627"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=131627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}