My Facebook account was hacked and quickly deleted. Deleted. As in, “permanently” deleted and unable to be retrieved within a couple of hours. As you can imagine, I was gutted. I had years and years of memories, photos, resources for my boys, etc. I completely understand that there are plenty of people that think I am exaggerating my emotions. That’s fine. That’s you. Cool. You do you, but I was frantically searching for a way to undo the damage. Under the given circumstances, this could not be true.
Let me explain how this all began…
On Friday, November 4, 2022, I was sitting at my desk working on reports, reading/sending emails, documenting, etc for my case manager job. My computer can be slow and my ADHD brain craves activity. I was casually scrolling FB on my phone in between waiting on my work computer to catch up with my clicks. I saw some notifications that looked legit at a quick glance. So I clicked on them. Wait, let me back track a bit more.
I have a photography business page. I haven’t technically been very active on there since I moved from Georgia. Many years ago, I had a few of my newborn photos reported for nudity. <insert eye roll> Either it was a hateful weirdo or a jealous competitor because I have never placed a sweet babe in an explicit position for a photo, much less posted one. Anyway, I appealed and FB agreed.
I tell you all that to explain what my first thought was when I saw the notifications were for violating community standards. It must have been a mistake. I had not violated anything. I couldn’t possibly have because all I had shared was regarding college football. Nothing explicit. It looked official within the FB app itself. So I didn’t think anything of clicking the link. It took me through “proving” my identity. Yes, I am ashamed to admit that I uploaded my ID. I felt pressured that if I didn’t, then my account would be permanently disabled. I followed the directions given and then got hit with the following message.
What?!? Disabled and can’t be reversed? When I went through the community standards page to see what could get you permanently disabled with no possibility of a review, I found that it basically had to be child pornography. OMG! There is no way this could be right! I searched everywhere to get help. Do you know that there is no phone number? No way to speak to an actual person? Nope. None. I sent emails, requests, and reports to any address that I could find. Guess what??? Now my Instagram was gone, too, because it was linked to my FB account. Yes, I understand that this is first world problems. I get it. If it’s not you, then you can’t comprehend my feeling of helplessness. Not only did I lose contacts, pictures, memories that I had built since 2008, but I also lost all of the connections/resources that I had built for my boys over the years. All of it gone. Oh, and see that little blue button above that says “download your information?” Yea, that didn’t work.
Next, I decided to go on other social media sites- TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, etc to see if anyone had any suggestions. I was shocked to find thousands of people going through the same thing as me. One lady on TikTok bought an Oculus. She made sure that she could use it on her FB account.. So they reinstated her account. Um, $400?? No. Well, I did consider it, but when I reached out, they wouldn’t budge on giving me back my account. I found one other person, that I had considered to be a friend, who successfully got their account back. They were able to get in touch with someone on LinkedIn, but wouldn’t help me. Seriously. This person knew and UNDERSTOOD how gutted I felt. They knew how much I lost and still wouldn’t help me. Actually, they blocked me. While I was angry at Meta, this hurt my heart. How can you not help someone, even a stranger, that is desperately asking for help?
Well, my title above states that I got my account back. I don’t gate keep, even strangers, so let me show you how I did it. Funny enough, a sweet stranger reached out to me on TikTok and shared what she was instructed to do. At that time, she had not got hers back yet. But, here is what you are going to do… and it’s free! DO NOT pay someone to try and get it back.
Click the link above and head over to make a complaint with the California Attorney General. You can print the submission for your records. I did this on November 21, 2022. A few days later, I received a letter in the mail dated from November 22, 2022.
I still kept reaching out and trying other avenues. No luck. In late December, out of the blue, my account was reinstated even though it was supposedly permanently disabled. Once I got in, I quickly changed passcodes and all that jazz. Then, I started poking around and came across the warnings. There were multiple before the permanent ban. The information I could gather was that the freak hacker attempted to upload kiddie porn. <insert multiple expletives> Oh, and they used my credit card for around $140. Thankfully, I was able to get that back.
Two months later, I received a letter in the mail. Thank you, Rob Bonta’s office!
That’s it. A little time consuming, but easy & FREE! Now, I’m going to show you a few examples of how “they” do it. Hackers. Sneaky sneaky. Obviously, some examples are more professional looking than others, but you’ll get the gist of it.
When you are tagged, click to remove the tag, then report and block!
Oh, and go beef up your security, add two factor authentication for log in, and slow your roll when you click on links. Hope all this helps!
