In July 2024, my Facebook profile was hacked, posing an urgent challenge for me as a marketer. Four business pages were attached to that account, which I lost access to. This incident ranks among the toughest I've faced in my career. If my work didn't demand it, I would never return to Facebook again. Here's a recount of what happened.
On July 4, 2024, I received an email from Facebook alerting me that someone was trying to access my account in Portugal. I was working, so I saw the notice and immediately went to my Facebook. An alert on my account provided a link for me to change my password. I followed the prompts, changed my password, logged out of Facebook, and then logged back in using the new password. It seemed that everything was okay.
The next morning, I woke up and saw that I was logged out of Facebook. I tried to log back in using the password I had set up the previous day. The password didn’t work; I tried a couple of times and tried the old password, and it worked. I thought to myself, this isn’t good. I need to change my password again. I went to change my password and received an error message saying I had already changed my password in the last 24 hours and needed to try again later. Towards the end of the day, I tried again and received the same notice.
I woke up the next morning and was locked out of Facebook; there was a notice that my account was suspended, and I could download the files for my account. I had 180 days to dispute the suspension. The notice said I would need to dispute it through my Instagram account. I have had this Facebook account since 2008. I had different emotions over the situation; it was almost like a grieving process. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; I thought this had to be a mistake. I downloaded the files, and there was an activity log in the files; the hacker went into my account from Portugal and changed my email address at two in the morning.
Because the hacker changed my email, I didn’t get a notice about the suspension from Facebook; it went to the fraudulent email address. They send you an email to dispute, but you will be out of luck if you don’t get that email. I had another Facebook account, so I logged into that because you can’t do anything on Facebook if you don’t have a Facebook account, which is nuts if they took your access away, but I digress. Anyway, the other account was one I had since the early 2000s. I used it for games because I didn’t want to have a bunch of junk in my account.
I cleaned the account, changed the info, and added my contacts again. That was messy, and people freaked out about it, too. All day, I had to tell stories to prove I was me, not someone who had cloned my account. I am still trying to get my friends back on that account, and it’s been a month.
I was going through Meta and trying to write to someone. I had the logs and the email from someone trying to get into my account. I even had a screenshot of me changing my password on the 4th. I screenshot it to see the password to which I changed it. I dug and dug, but I could find no point of contact. I went through Instagram, went to Meta, and did everything I could think of, but I couldn’t find a point of contact.
Finally, I went to Reddit, where I could find emails and a phone number. I emailed every address I could find, explaining what happened, providing documents, and asking for an explanation or response. I got nothing. I called the phone number that I found; it’s a recorded message that does nothing but tell you to go to the Meta website.
I spent the whole weekend and into Monday trying to get help to resolve the problem, but no one was available. I even went on LinkedIn and wrote every Meta employee I could find; they must be trained to ignore messages. Finally, I realized I did everything I could; I spent hours trying to fix it, reading through everything, seeing parts of Meta that I didn’t even know existed and which, by the way, is a confusing web of garbage that makes no sense. There was a time when you could talk to a Facebook employee. I had done it before, but that time is gone; there is no service to help.
One of the most insane aspects is that if you have a business page on Facebook, they do not remove it if you get your profile suspended. So now you have these floating business pages that you can’t do anything with post, remove posts, see customer emails that could come in, nothing, no access, just business pages that lead to a cyber pool of nothingness. How is this good for the consumer? It creates distrust in the community and taints the Facebook platform for businesses. The lack of access created another problem: I ran an ad on Facebook for one of the businesses. Now I have no access to the page, and the Ad just continues to run, and I keep getting charged. I can’t cancel it. I thought I had removed the payment from my bank, but I got another charge for it this last week. I disputed the charges, sent all the emails to my bank that I sent to Facebook, and provided my bank with the documents that Facebook provided me with showing that my account was inaccessible. I am waiting for the response from my bank.
This is a dirty business. How can you take access from someone, give them no means to contact you, and then continue to charge for services that the end user can’t use or cancel? Why make everything so confusing? I discovered the following layers to Facebook in this whole mess:
Personal profile
Business Profile
Meta Suite
Meta Portfolio
Meta Ad center
Meta Help
Facebook Help
Instagram
Instagram Help
You just spin in the meta web. One link leads you to a different section, and then that one leads to a different section. They tell you you're in the wrong place and send you somewhere else, and you never get the answer.
The whole experience was awful. I don’t like the platform at all; it’s just a necessary evil. The hardest part of all of this is the people that have passed away in my life that I can’t be friends with anymore. I used Facebook as a memorial. When I thought of those gone, I would go to their page and have moments of remembering them. I can’t do that anymore; I can’t read their messages; it’s gone. There’s a bit of a sense of morning them again.
This experience has been one of my most challenging and frustrating moments in my marketing career. Despite being security-savvy and taking all necessary precautions, I still found myself vulnerable to a hacking incident that compromised my account and affected my professional responsibilities. The lack of accessible customer support from Facebook and Meta compounded the problem, leaving me in a helpless situation where I could neither manage my business pages nor stop ongoing charges for ads I could no longer control.
This ordeal has reshaped my perception of Facebook. It's a platform fraught with complexities and a labyrinthine support system that fails its users when they need it most. The emotional toll of losing access to my connections, especially those who have passed away, adds another layer of grief to this experience.
While I’ve done everything possible to rectify the situation, I remain disheartened by the lack of resolution and support. Moving forward, I will be more cautious and critical of the platforms I rely on, seeking more secure and reliable alternatives. This incident has reinforced the importance of having backup plans and diversifying my professional toolkit to mitigate the impact of such vulnerabilities in the future.
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