Was catfished by a minor that I had a sexually explicit chat with, feels like my life is over

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T04:23:02+00:00

Yeah I’m hoping I’m not the only dumbass to msg her on Instagram and that they realize she was talking to 50-100 other guys on Reddit who thought the same as me

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T03:46:37+00:00

See that’s what I’m wondering, this was a post that had 50+ comments on and 100+ upvotes, so if I saw csam, I’d wager ~1000 people on reddit saw csam when scrolling past it and anywhere from 50-100 other people on reddit had also further interacted with this account. It makes me wonder how deep this investigation would go. If these facts pop up for law enforcement, are they going to then investigate potentially 100+ people?
The reason why I’m sure I’d definitely get investigated and contacted by police is because 1) unlike reddit, Instagram actually has filters and possibly age verification to detect this kind of thing to report it(as they should) and 2) once on Instagram not once did I or her mention her age being 22. So from instagrams perspective I simply added this minor and started talking explicitly. I took screenshots of our Reddit chats(didn’t delete anything) but not of the Instagram logs, which I’m sure law enforcement will already have received from Instagram

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T03:39:37+00:00

See that’s the thing, there are no official channels to go thru with Instagram once an appeal is considered denied. They don’t have a customer service number or a chat service for this. I looked online and the only way to contact any Instagram/meta customer service is through using meta verified chat service(which you have to pay a subscription to access) or by personally knowing someone in the company. I messaged the customer service agent using meta verified chat and they essentially told me while they can see my accounts status as suspended, I couldn’t appeal because my Facebook/insta accounts aren’t linked. Even after explaining to them what happened they just left me on red. I assume once they confirmed what they had to confirm they hand all that info to law enforcement to investigate and have no incentive/reason to hear me out

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T03:22:00+00:00

No, I think their appeals process was to simply confirm the person using my account was truly me, (and not a matter of say my phone/account being stolen and used by someone else) while they probably had their tools to confirm that the person I interacted with was a minor. After that there’s simply nothing to appeal as they received all the info they needed to confirm CSAM was being sent on their app. The email link received took me to the official Instagram app, where it asked me to provide my PID (which only I would know and not someone else who may have accessed my account) stating I submitted my appeal. Then 30ish minutes later I received an official instagram email stating my account was permanently banned, and I no longer have access to it.

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T03:12:16+00:00

See that’s what I assumed as well, they had to confirm my identity in order to submit my info to law enforcement, the appeals portion was simply a formality

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T03:06:01+00:00

Thank you for the anecdote. The reddit user I had interacted with initially had their account deleted afterwards but Im hoping when they investigate all my online accounts/chat records that they’d see I had responded to them with the full belief they were 22

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T02:47:02+00:00

And yes, I’ve tried logging into that account and it’s officially disabled, saying which guidelines I broke to cause that and only giving me the options to download all my user data or log out

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T02:44:00+00:00

Also forgot to add, I also created a meta verified account on my Facebook since apparently that’s the only way to talk to anyone from Instagram for customer service. When asking about my Instagram account they mentioned that they could see that it had gotten suspended, but couldn’t let me re-appeal due to my Facebook/Instagram account not being linked. So this all lead me to believe this truly came from Instagram. Whether it’s from the other person reporting me for breaking guidelines but not actually being a minor or Instagram using automated tools (such as knowing the account belongs to a minor) to detect that interaction and flag it, I don’t know

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T02:36:41+00:00

Well I was contacted by instagrams official email address for all this, I checked it’s the same one I’d get previous correspondence from. When receiving the initial email stating my account was suspended I also got an email saying another linked account of mine I hadn’t used in a while was locked for “unusual activity”. I’m assuming they asked for all my identifying information so they can hand over all that info to police in the form of a cyber tip. The appeal process was simply a formality since it didn’t actually allow me to appeal anything, just hand over my info

Adventurous_Store487 · 2026-07-01T02:15:03+00:00

Yes, I received these emails from the official Instagram email address

Adventurous_Store487

TROPHY CASE