It occurs to me there's probably a whole industry built around snatching up interesting account names for all the new services in the hopes that one might make it big. It's slightly complicated by the fact that different norms develop for different platforms (e.g. @realDonaldTrump on twitter because of what I assume were satire accounts).

There are probably people out there with spreadsheets full of service types, account names and passwords of accounts they control that include all the two letter to four or five letter company names, and many celebrity names, just in the case that someone wants to pay for it. The domain name game, just evolved for the current climate.

I mean, it would take me less than $25k worth of my time to build something to automate this, even if I had to get rotating IPs, mobile accounts, and have mechanical turk to solve CAPTCHAs (although with all those features it might be close), and you were offered that for one account.

If it's such a pain why don't you sell it for 25K

They wanted to pay via PayPal. I'm not accepting anything reversible for it.

Also, I don't want to be out of it if they report to Instagram that it's for sale etc.

Go big, ask ten times more and feel relieved from that pain.

is your account yielding you more than 25k in discounted cash flow? if not, why not sell?