Hey, can I have your username?

When influencer Katherine Driscoll got married, she wanted to get her affairs in order — starting with Instagram. Now Katherine Asplundh, she went in search of the matching username, only to find it had already been claimed. She sent the user a message: “I was wondering if I could purchase your username from you,” she wrote. “Just got married and this is my new name!”

Katherine Asplundh (the other one) declined. She was worried it would get her account banned, but the original Katherine pushed. “I purchased my username in the past,” she insisted. “Celebrities do it all the time.”

Things escalated. The first Katherine accused the second of stealing her identity, and the second took screenshots that went viral across Reddit and X. Asplundh, the influencer, was dragged across comment sections and the Daily Mail. She took her Instagram, stuck as @katherinedrisc, private. 

Unfortunately for the new Mrs. Asplundh, the law is on the side of Ms. Asplundh. “You have no right to a username,” Paula Brillson, managing attorney of the Digital Law Group, told me. Instead, all usernames are the property of the platform they’re registered to. “You're a guest,” she said. “You're leasing space and that is your ID.”

But Asplundh was right about one thing: people buy and sell usernames all the time. Despite account transfers being against the rules of most major social-media platforms, the practice has become increasingly widespread over the last decade, as the number of people looking for digital real estate on social media jumped from 2 billion to 5 billion.

“Usernames are super important for companies,” said Roel Oosterwijk, a 25-year-old ticket agent at SWAPD, a digital rights marketplace. “And, of course, also as a status symbol for some users. If you have a short username containing your brand name, it looks more legitimate. And companies do have a big budget usually to obtain that handle.” 

This can happen a few different ways, the first being to pay for and take over an account with an established following. However, “that's a switchover that your audience is not going to like,” said Dorien Morin-van Dam, the founder of More In Media, a social-media management firm. You can also turn to an inactive account, which has less risk, but that’s something that could potentially be achieved at no cost by contacting certain platforms themselves. 

And then there’s simply paying someone to change their username so it becomes available for you. All are against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X’s policies — despite X owner Elon Musk reportedly considering authorizing the practice. But consequences are mostly the result of self-policing; it’s unlikely a platform would hunt you down. However, if you are squatting on a username for the purposes of selling it, Instagram might purge it as part of its inactive-account policy.

The most Oosterwijk ever saw a username go for was $200,000, but typically prices range between $1,000 and $100,000, with most falling in the single and tens of thousands. “The shorter and the more generic the username is, the more valuable it is,” he said.

Historically, these transactions mostly took place, like Asplundh’s encounter, in the DMs. But this can be risky: someone has to shoot first and trust the other won’t walk away with either the money or the username. 

That happened to 31-year-old Omar in 2017. He was one of the first 200 people to join Instagram and secured @Omar as his username. By 2014, people were trying to purchase it from him. “One day this guy reached out to me and then he told me he'd pay me in cryptocurrency,” Omar said. “He kind of played the long game and established my trust.”

He offered Omar $40,000 in ethereum, which was about to become even more valuable. “I was pretty keen on closing this transaction,” he said. But as soon as the buyer got into Omar’s account, he locked Omar out — without paying him a dime (Omar said that @Omar’s current owner, Sports Center’s Omar Raja, is not the one who scammed him.)

There are very few rights a person has to a specific username. Celebrities or brands could potentially go after usernames if the name is trademarked, or the person behind it was harming their goodwill or using their likeness for monetary gain. Musk famously cracked down on fake “Elon Musk” accounts after his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, and Meta appeared to acquire the @meta handle from a motorcycle magazine under mysterious circumstances in 2021. Aside from that, however, anyone can have any name online, even one that isn’t theirs. It’s no different than writing under a pseudonym.

Oosterwijk said SWAPD sees an increase in users every year. The company has 60,000 members, and about 100,000 people facilitate tens of thousands of sales a year. 

The safest way to purchase a username, Morin-van Dam says, is to not trade money at all. Try to connect with the account directly to ask for the name for free, or if the account is inactive, take the issue to Meta. “If you run ads, if you pay money to Facebook, usually you get a Facebook ad rep,” she said, as a point of contact. Otherwise, she recommends buying a trademark for the name and similarly presenting the paperwork to Meta. 

“Now, if somebody comes to you and says, ‘Hey, I've got this and I want to sell it to you,’ I would be very wary of that,” she said. “The only way I would even consider exchanging money would be through a trust account.” 

With a trust, a third party controls the exchange of assets, similar to a middleman service like SWAPD. An agent like Oosterwijk collects the payment and the username and verifies both users are legitimate. “And then if everything checks out, we transfer it and then the ticket is basically done,” Oosterwijk said. While maybe one out of every 1,000 deals goes bad, SWAPD has a victim fund to reimburse any affected users. 

Others, however, don’t think it’s worth it. Unless your username is lost in a hack, a user who’s been scammed has no recourse on the platforms, Morin-van Dam said. Most of all, it doesn’t really matter. “There are plenty of other alternatives to getting a name that is close to what you want,” she said. “Your username is only this little part of searching on Instagram [through which] people are going to come to you.”

But with scams running rampant and demand only increasing, is it fair to expect that one day, there will be username regulations?

The answer is: who knows? “Digital rights are an evolving area,” Brillson said, noting that the closest we have to any sort of regulation of our online selves is the right of publicity laws, which vary state to state and apply only to the commercial use of an individual's personal characteristics. Thus, for the foreseeable future, Katherine Asplundh (née Driscoll) will remain, at least on Instagram, @katherinedrisc. 

Kathryn Lindsay is a culture writer and the cofounder of Embedded, a newsletter about the internet.