How to Remove a Fake Instagram or Facebook Account Impersonating You in India

First, which kind of fake account is it?

What remains is impersonation: a profile that claims to be you. It is the one non-sexual category Indian law places on the shortest removal clock, and it is a criminal offence for the person who made it. The order below is the order RepuLex uses on its own matters: preserve, report, complain under the rules, file the criminal complaint, and only then, if the account is still up, escalate through the partner law firm.

Preserve evidence before you report

Report the account a few minutes later, not at once: a successful report deletes the evidence with the account, and a police complaint, a grievance complaint and any later court application all need to show what existed, when, and what it did.

Capture five things. The profile URL and the exact username, including underscores or lookalike characters, since the name will be recycled. The numeric account ID, which survives a username change and can be read from the profile's page source in a desktop browser. Full-page screenshots of the profile and of every post and story that uses your photographs, with the date recorded alongside. The handles of accounts the impostor has messaged, followed or tagged. And any message asking for money, because that converts identity theft into cheating and changes the sections the police apply.

Keep the originals of your own photographs the account has copied, with their metadata, because ownership of the images is the fastest proof that the account is not you. Do not message or warn the impostor, and do not ask friends to mass-report the account: a burst of reports from one network reads as brigading, and a warned impostor moves to a new username with the same photographs.

Report impersonation to Instagram and Facebook: the free route, step by step

Instagram's own impersonation report costs nothing and is the first thing filed on day one of any matter RepuLex handles, because it starts the platform's review and creates a dated record. Open the impostor's profile, open the options menu beside the username, choose Report, then Report account, then the option for an account pretending to be someone else, and say whether it is pretending to be you, someone you follow, a public figure or a business. The report is anonymous.

If you do not have an Instagram account, or the account impersonates someone you are authorised to act for, such as your child or your company, Instagram publishes a web form for impersonation reports outside the app, reached from the Impersonation Accounts page of its help centre. It first asks which situation applies and then asks you to identify yourself. Be ready to prove who you are: Meta's impersonation forms can ask for a photograph of a government-issued identity document, and a report that cannot be matched to a real person is closed.

Facebook runs the same report from the fake profile, through the report option for a profile pretending to be you or someone you know, and Meta keeps an equivalent web form for people without a Facebook account. File on both platforms if the impostor exists on both; Meta reviews each account separately.

Meta also publishes, for India, a page in the Instagram help centre headed How to contact the Grievance Officer and Meta in India. It names the grievance officer, carries the contact form through which grievances are filed, and states that the officer's role under the IT Act 2000 is to redress grievances of users and victims in India, not to receive legal process. Use that form for the complaint in the next section.

The two-hour lane: impersonation under Rule 3(2)(b)

An in-app report asks Meta to apply its own rules. A complaint to the grievance officer under the IT Rules 2021 asks it to meet a statutory deadline, and for impersonation that deadline is the shortest in Indian content law. Rule 3(2)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 requires an intermediary, within two hours of a complaint by an individual or by any person on their behalf, to take all reasonable and practicable measures to remove or disable access to content that is prima facie in the nature of impersonation in an electronic form, including artificially morphed images of that individual. The two-hour figure was substituted by G.S.R. 120(E) of 10 February 2026 and applies from 20 February 2026 (the period was 24 hours until 20 February 2026).

Read what the rule does and does not say. It covers a profile passing itself off as you, and it expressly covers morphed images, so a fake account built on an edited photograph of your face is inside it. It does not cover a parody that is plainly not claiming to be you, criticism posted under the critic's own name, or a defamatory post by an identifiable person. Those run on the ordinary grievance clock under Rule 3(2)(a)(i), seven days from receipt; defamation left the fast-lane list in October 2022.

Two neighbouring provisions matter. Rule 3(2)(a) obliges every intermediary to prominently publish its grievance officer's contact details and the complaint mechanism, and Rule 3(2)(c) obliges it to run a mechanism through which a Rule 3(2)(b) complainant can supply details of the content; in practice, Meta's contact form. The complaint should identify you, state that the account impersonates you, list the URL, username and account ID, attach the screenshots and your original photographs, cite Rule 3(2)(b) and ask for removal within two hours.

If the officer refuses, or the period passes without action, the appeal lies to the Grievance Appellate Committee at gac.gov.in: thirty days from the officer's communication to file under Rule 3A, a decision the committee is to endeavour to give within thirty calendar days, and orders that bind the platform. The committee's site says it does not deal with financial fraud or cybercrime, so it is an appeal about the removal, not a substitute for the police complaint.

Filing at cybercrime.gov.in for a fake Instagram or Facebook account

A fake account using your name and photographs is a criminal matter as well as a platform one, and the complaint is filed at the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, cybercrime.gov.in, or by calling 1930. The portal's category for crime against women and children can be filed anonymously or through Register and Track; where the impersonation is sexual in character a woman may use that route. Every other impersonation goes through Report Other Cyber Crime, which requires registration and returns an acknowledgement number for the Track your Complaint page.

These are the sections that fit an impersonation account. Section 66C of the Information Technology Act 2000, identity theft, covers fraudulent or dishonest use of your password, electronic signature or any other unique identification feature, and carries imprisonment up to three years and a fine up to one lakh rupees. Section 66D, cheating by personation using a computer resource or communication device, carries the same punishment and applies once the account is used to obtain anything from your contacts. Section 319 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, cheating by personation, provides in sub-section (2) imprisonment up to five years, a fine or both. Where the account posts material damaging your reputation, section 356 defamation applies, with simple imprisonment up to two years, a fine, both, or community service; where the profile is a forged electronic record intended to harm your reputation, section 336(4) provides imprisonment up to three years and a fine.

You can also walk into any police station. Section 173(1) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023 provides that information about a cognizable offence may be given at any police station irrespective of the area where the offence was committed, the provision behind the Zero FIR, and by electronic communication if you sign it within three days. Sections 66C and 66D carry up to three years' imprisonment, which the IT Act makes cognizable, so a station cannot decline to record the information because the impostor is in another city. Ask for the FIR number.

LinkedIn, X, Snapchat and Telegram fake profiles: the same route, different forms

The law does not change with the platform. Every intermediary offering its service in India is bound by the same Rule 3(2)(b) period for impersonation and the same grievance-officer obligation, and each of these four publishes a route. What changes is where the form is. The table gives the paths as each platform publishes them in September 2026.

Two cautions. Telegram is slower and less consistent than the others, and a fake Telegram profile usually sits beside channels distributing your photographs, so read the Telegram leaked-content page before filing there. And a fake LinkedIn profile that messages your contacts under your name is cheating by personation under section 319 as well as identity theft under section 66C, so the messages it sent are the first evidence to capture.

When the fake account stays up: the legal route

Most impersonation accounts come down on the platform report or the grievance complaint. Some do not: the account has been edited to look like a fan page, the photographs have been swapped, Meta has treated the complaint as a dispute over a name, or the platform ignores its own grievance officer. From this point the work is legal, and it is paid.

RepuLex is an online reputation management agency and not a law firm. When a matter reaches this stage its partner law firm, Unified Chambers And Associates, issues a formal notice under advocate signature to the platform's grievance officer, setting out the impersonation, the rule breached and the evidence, with the criminal complaint annexed. That notice does not by itself strip the platform of its safe harbour: since Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, decided by the Supreme Court on 24 March 2015, the actual knowledge that obliges an intermediary to act under section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act comes from a court order or a notification by the appropriate Government or its agency, not from a private letter. What the notice does is fix the platform with a documented refusal under Rule 3(2)(b), the ground the next step is built on.

The next step is the court-order lane. Rule 3(1)(d) now provides that on receiving actual knowledge, which the rule says arises only by an order of a court of competent jurisdiction or a reasoned written intimation from an authorised government officer, the intermediary must remove or disable access within three hours. The partner firm's advocates apply to the appropriate court for an order directing removal and, where you want to know who made the account, for an order directing the platform to disclose the basic subscriber information behind it. The disclosure is only as good as the details the impostor gave, which is why the police complaint runs in parallel.

Where RepuLex is engaged, this is priced per URL: ₹99,999 per link plus GST for a standard fake account, with packages of 3 links at ₹2,49,999 and 10 links at ₹7,49,999 for a spread across platforms, and matters that have reached the news media, a court record or a legal database quoted separately from ₹1,00,000 per URL. Fees are payable in full in advance and are refunded in full for any URL not removed within the agreed timeline, including where a platform refuses; that risk sits with RepuLex, not you. Concessional rates exist for individuals. No outcome is guaranteed and no timeline is promised. Meta's separate legal channel for Instagram, and when to file it yourself, is covered on the Instagram legal removal request page.

If the impersonated person is a minor

If the account impersonates a child, or posts images of a child, this is not a reputation matter and RepuLex will not treat it as one. Report it to the police and at cybercrime.gov.in under the women and children category the same day. Where any image is sexual, section 67B of the IT Act covers publishing, transmitting, creating, collecting or browsing material depicting a child in a sexually explicit or indecent manner, with imprisonment up to five years and a fine up to ten lakh rupees on first conviction, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012 applies alongside it.

A parent or guardian can still file Instagram's impersonation form, which has an option for an account impersonating someone you represent, and the Rule 3(2)(b) complaint, since the rule allows a complaint by any person on the individual's behalf. RepuLex will point a family to those routes and to the police; it does not accept an instruction to handle a matter involving a minor quietly instead of reporting it.