So unless you have been under a rock for the last few years you’ve no doubt heard of Instagram.

Well about a year or so a go I set up an account of my own and linked it to my Facebook photography page. I made a good attempt at it for a month or two and then in all honesty my photography and social media commitments fell by the way side.

Now recently i decided I was going to try and up my game and get going again. So i went to log into my account……..only to be told user does not exist.

My first thought was that my account was deleted due to inactivity, fair enough i thought. then as if someone was reading my mind i received a message from an old school friend telling me my account had been hijacked.

She had noticed random Russian ads appearing from from a name she did not recognise. so she scrolled down through all of the useless spam and comes across my photos still at the bottom of the page.

Simple you think, reclaim the account and change the password etc….that was my first thought. WRONG!

The culprit had not only changed my email but they had also changed the username….so i thought “I know! I’ll contact Instagram technical support”…………..

Instagram don’t have technical support, they have a series of useless self help pages that don’t fix anything.

Having done some research I have since found out that this is a common issue, and unless you know a Facebook engineer personally, your more likely to find Pegasus grazing in your back garden.

 I don’t think I could possibly trust Instagram again. Who knows what else I will lose. As far as I am concerned, it is a broken platform that is missing the support it needs to useful.

One final point to be aware of; as the person who had taken my account had changed the username, i decided recently to try and set it up again from scratch.

Everything went well up to the point i attempted to link m Facebook photography page through to Instagram. It told me I was already linked…..to the hacked account. Even though I still could not post to it.

So I un-linked the accounts and went through the setup again to re-link to my reclaimed username. Low and behold, it tells me my account is already linked to the hacked account, even going as far to throw the hackers username in my face.

For me that was it, the towel was officially thrown in.

Be careful people; once its gone, it’s gone!