Insta Accounts, an Android app that finds Instagram impersonators
Type a brand or a person’s name. The app searches Instagram for every account that looks like it, flags the suspicious ones, and saves the list as an Excel file.
- Year
- 2026
- Type
- Android app
- Built with
- Java, Android Accessibility Service, GitHub Actions
Try the look-alike checkPrivate repository
The problem
Brands and creators get copied on Instagram all the time. The fakes add “official” or “support” to a real name, swap an o for a 0, or slip in an underscore. Finding them by hand means dozens of searches and a lot of scrolling, and the list is out of date by the time you finish.
What it does
You enter one or more keywords. For each one the app opens Instagram, searches the term, switches to the Accounts tab, scrolls through the results and records every account it sees. It then saves an Excel file with these columns: photo, keyword, search term, rank, username, full name, verified, flags, profile link and the time it was found.
Results for one keyword are merged without duplicates, and every account gets a set of flags explaining why it looks suspicious. Accounts you mark as your own show up as Official.
Searching for look-alikes
Optionally, the app also searches variations of each keyword, the spellings an impersonator would pick. For the keyword test:
| Variation | Examples |
|---|---|
| A digit at the end | test0 to test9 |
| A letter at the end | testa to testz |
| Impersonator words | test_official, testsupport, realtest, thetest |
| Underscores and dots | _test, test_, te_st, test. |
| Look-alike characters | t3st, te5t, 7est, and rn for m, l for i |
| Typos | tesst, tset, tst |
You can try the same rules on the home page: the look-alike finder there is a JavaScript port of the app’s Java code.
How it scores risk
Each account is compared with the keyword after undoing the usual tricks, so t3st_0fficial is read as testofficial. Points are added for a look-alike username, risky words such as “support”, “giveaway” or “refund”, numbers standing in for letters, extra numbers or underscores, and a missing verified badge. Verified accounts lose points. The total becomes a high, medium or low risk level.
How it works
- Accessibility service. The app drives the real Instagram app the way a person would, which means no private API and no password handed to a third party.
- Polite by design. It pauses 30 to 60 seconds every 10 searches and stops after 5 failed searches in a row, which usually means Instagram is limiting the account.
- Excel without libraries. The .xlsx writer is plain Java, written from scratch so it runs on Android, and it embeds each account’s round profile photo in the first column. An HTML copy is saved too, for phones without a spreadsheet app.
- Easy updates. GitHub Actions builds every APK and signs it with the same key, so a new version installs straight over the old one.