Feeling someone’s been stalking you on Instagram? You’re definitely not alone! When most people use Instagram as a public album, there’re quite a few who just lurk around and use it as a way to stalk their crushes. If you’re curious, here’s how you can find out which user is stalking you, and who’s behind the account.

Step 1: See who’s stalking your Instagram

In 2016 Instagram rolled out the Stories feature, allowing you to share photos or videos in a slideshow format. Most stalkers won’t miss out on the latest posts of their target, and that’s when you can take advantage of this feature and find out who’s been stalking you the whole time.

1. Post an Instagram Story. Even a random one will do. (If you don’t know how, simply tap the Your Story icon at the top-left corner.)
   It’s even better if you’ve already posted a Story not long ago.
   
2. Tap your Story. At the bottom left corner, you can see how many people have viewed your Story. Tap the people icon to see a list of viewers.
   
3. In the list you’ll find who viewed your IG Story. If you’re not a superstar who has thousands of followers, you can forget about how Instagram ranks the viewers and simply look for strange usernames. (You can also hide the story from people you don’t like.)
   

Step 2: Find out who’s behind the IG account

Once you know who’s been stalking you, you can do a reverse social media search to find out who owns this account (including private ones).

1. Lookup the username on BeenVerified

When it comes to identifying users on Instagram, you’ll want to make BeenVerified your first stop. With a database of billions of public records, BeenVerified allows you to reverse lookup usernames on 55+ social networks. You can find out who that is, where they live and what other accounts they have.

1. Go to the BeenVerified search page.
2. Enter the Instagram username in the search box and click Search.
   
3. Wait a few minutes for the search to complete. The full report will uncover everything in detail about the Instagram account owner: name, phone number, email address, and photos when available.
   

2. Search the photo on Social Catfish

Another hack of finding the owner is called reverse image search. Since not everyone has so many different photos for sharing, you can trace the image/avatar on other platforms.

And to do that you can use Social Catfish. It’s a people search engine that features a powerful image search. It collects social media data to help you find if someone is using aliases on social sites. Simply upload the photo and Social Catfish will scan for matches in hundreds of social media sites, including dating platforms like Tinder and Match.

1. Go to the Social Catfish search page. Upload an image and click Search.
   
2. It may take a few minutes for Social Catfish to scan social platforms. Once it finds the owner, you’ll see all the available profiles containing that photo.
   

3. Google the username

To be honest this should be the first method you try, even though it’s less effective than the two websites above. If the stalker uses the same alias in multiple sites, you might get other useful information from Google: like finding schools from Facebook, tracking workplace from LinkedIn, etc. This could be time-consuming but absolutely worth a shot.