Our Story
IGDetective was born from a simple belief: everyone deserves faster access to the truth.
Steven Duncan
Founder, and the byline on IGDetective guides. Editorial standards
What is IGDetective?
IGDetective (igdetective.com) is a web-based Instagram activity tracker founded in 2025 by Steven Duncan. It monitors public Instagram accounts for recent follows and recent followers (paid plan, each dated the day it is first seen), likes, comments and Stories, and lets you watch Stories anonymously, with no Instagram login and no access to anyone's password. It runs in the browser.
IGDetective is not related to the open-source “IG-Detective” OSINT script published on GitHub. That project shares a similar name but is a separate, unaffiliated tool.
Last updated . What changed: clarified that recent follows and followers are on the paid plan, after Instagram's September 9 follow list change.
It Started with a Gut Feeling
In 2025, our founder Steven was in a relationship that felt off. Nothing he could point to specifically: no smoking gun, no dramatic confrontation. Just a quiet, persistent feeling in the pit of his stomach that something wasn't right.
Without any real evidence, he did what most people do: he started looking. Manually. Every day, he'd scroll through her Instagram, checking who she recently followed, who was liking her photos, whose comments kept showing up. It became an obsession, but a painstaking one. Hours spent cross-referencing followers lists, trying to remember if a name was new or not.
After weeks of this, he finally found the pattern. She was following a string of new guys and consistently interacting with them: liking, commenting, the subtle signals that told the full story. His gut had been right all along.
Steven got out of that relationship. But it had cost him months of anxiety, lost sleep, and emotional energy. Months he couldn't get back. And one thought kept nagging him:
“What if a tool could have confirmed my intuition in days instead of months?”
Then It Hit Closer to Home
Around the same time, Steven's sister came to him with a completely different concern. She was worried about her daughter, not about a relationship, but about who she was hanging out with at school. The kind of worry that every parent knows: you sense something is off, but your kid isn't exactly going to volunteer the details.
Steven offered her the early version of the tool he'd been building for himself. Within days, his sister had a clear picture of who her daughter was connecting with on Instagram, and some of those connections were genuinely concerning.
Because she caught it early, she was able to step in and have the right conversations before anything bad came of it. No drama. No fallout. Just a parent who had the information she needed, when she needed it.
That's when Steven knew he was onto something bigger than his own situation. This wasn't just a tool for suspicious partners. It was a tool for anyone who deserved quicker access to the truth.
Why IGDetective Exists
We built IGDetective because we believe your intuition matters. That nagging feeling you can't shake? It's usually there for a reason. But confirming it shouldn't require weeks of manual detective work or losing sleep over what you might be missing.
IGDetective quietly tracks the Instagram activity of the accounts you care about: recent follows, interaction patterns and Stories. It even lets you watch their stories anonymously, and it shows you the public activity so you don't have to hunt for it yourself.
Your intuition is powerful. IGDetective just helps you confirm it faster.
Built with Care
We take privacy seriously, both yours and that of the people you track. Everything we do is built on publicly available Instagram data, and we're committed to operating transparently. If you have questions, you can reach us at support@igdetective.com.