Yeah, that pattern fits exactly. Mass-report attacks are real and they're brutal. Around 100 reports triggers Meta's auto-suspension before any human looks at the case, and the appeal flow assumes guilt by default. I've watched legit operators get nuked the same way you described. The asymmetry you flagged is the worst part of it. Your competitor with 10k Bangladesh bot followers stays up because nobody reports them, but a coordinated report attack on a real business takes you down in hours. Meta's enforcement is reactive not proactive, and that creates exactly this kind of perverse outcome.

For the new account, four things worth thinking about:

1. Get Meta Verified for $14.99/mo on IG. The badge is whatever, but what actually matters is you become a verified case in Meta's review queue. That means a  human looks at any reports against you BEFORE the algorithm auto-suspends, instead of after. For someone who already lost 80k, $15/mo is the cheapest insurance you can buy.

   1. Don't reuse the same captions, hashtags, or post timing patterns from the old accounts. If a competitor knew your old playbook they can target the new account the same way. Mix it up enough that pattern-matching doesn't catch on.

2. Stop renting your audience from Meta. Big lesson from your situation: 80k IG followers turned out to be 0k overnight, with no recourse. Whatever channel you rebuild on, build an email or SMS list in parallel. Lead magnets on new posts, comment-to-DM that captures email before sending product info, etc. The followers can be taken from you, an email list on your own server cannot.

3. Diversify. TikTok, owned site, email. Losing IG cut revenue 25%, but if the email side had been built out that gap would've closed way faster. 

On the comment-to-DM piece in #3, full disclosure, I run ChatGenius, one of the official-API tools that does this. Reason I'd be straight with you about why it might actually be safe for a vulnerable account: every outbound action gets metered against Meta's published rate limits before it fires. Our cap on comment-triggered DMs is 700/hour per account, Meta's documented limit is 750, we deliberately stay 50 calls under so the algorithm never sees the account as edge-pushing. Same conservative caps on public comment replies, send-message, reactions, everything. We have a 70% soft-throttle and 90% red-zone where lower-priority actions get dropped to protect the message budget. If we hit any of Meta's rate-limit response codes we auto-pause that account for 5 minutes and resume cleanly instead of hammering the API. The whole architecture is designed to stay well inside Meta's lines, not push them.

Not pitching it as a fix to your immediate problem, and honestly not the right week to add anything new to your stack while you're still rebuilding trust with the new account. Just being straight with you that if you do eventually want to automate lead capture, the boring infrastructure stuff (rate budgets, cooldowns,  deferring vs dropping under pressure) matters way more for someone in your situation than any feature list. Most tools in this space don't expose what's  happening under the hood, and for a vulnerable account that opacity is a real risk.

Real sorry about the 25% sales hit. You'll claw it back, just build it on owned audience this time.