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I am not using a API but I have been looking into the API like a mad man trying to find some relevance to it. I am opening the website and downloading all of it at the moment to see if it contains "Page Not Found" but banned accounts also say the same thing. So is there any known way to distinguish this?

Austin
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Make a call to get the user /users/*user-id* and compare the result for non-existent users.

http://instagram.com/developer/endpoints/users/#get_users

You could also use the users search /users/search call to search by username, and iterate through the results and see if any match the username you are looking for exactly. If none of the results match exactly, then you know they don't exist (or are for some reason hidden).

AaronLS
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  • Thanks man, found this 10 min after posting :/. Should really put a bit more time into it. – Austin Feb 11 '15 at 00:40
  • @Austin Also, I think usernames and user-ids in instagram are different. The userid is just a number given to each user. The first call expects a userid, and the second expects a username. So it depends on what you are trying to check for the user with. – AaronLS Feb 11 '15 at 00:58
  • I'm working on something similar. The `/users/search` method outlined above doesn't work for everything (eg. "f", "r", and "stefan"). It won't return those usernames, so they are presumably free for the taking, but when you try to register them in the app it fails. Really what we need for this is the endpoint that the app uses to check if usernames have already been taken, but that is hidden from us. – willthefirst Nov 05 '15 at 14:16