How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?

This happened to my daughter. I got a notification that she'd changed her profile picture and it was changed to text that looked Arabic to me. Between the time I said something to my wife about it and my wife pulling up Facebook on her phone, the account was locked and disappeared.

HERE'S THE SOLUTION:

Purchase an Oculus device. Do not open it. It's a Facebook product and requires a Facebook account to use it. Oculus tech support has humans and inside channels to resurrect Facebook accounts that have been left in limbo by the dumb Facebook automated support.

Once you get your account back, return the Oculus device for a refund.

You have to act fairly quickly because the suspended Facebook accounts are permanently deleted and become completely unrecoverable after around 30 days.

So… this will be a useless answer for most and incredibly helpful for a few.

The best solution is to know, or befriend, someone who works at Facebook (you’re in the right forum to meet people).

The short: FB has an internal team dedicated to helping friends of employees fix account issues and they work very quickly.

I know, and have personally used, this service a few times and it’s super useful. (Sadly I don’t work for the company so I’m not helpful here.)

So if you know a FB/Meta employee, contact them about the “oops” team.

If you don’t know anyone, there’s a chance someone here could help (it is extra work for them and they’re putting their reputation on the line so think about how you can show/prove you’re a good actor.)

I’m going to guess that this isn’t helpful to your situation right now but perhaps you can use this info to find someone who can help. Good luck!

Since this thread is hot, I'd like to add a similar request as well: My mom has her FB account suspended 2 years ago for unknown reason, in fact we never really got a "suspended account" status. We just couldn't login, 2FA doesn't work (SMS message never came), then her account profile disappeared and become "Facebook user".

We started the process of unblocking the account by uploading Government ID, but after we uploaded the photos (her photos, passport's photo, her with passport etc... ), FB just stopped responding to us altogether.

The account has something close to 10 years of photo, without any backup, so any help would really really be appreciated. My email is human@nhanho.me

Edit: At the time, someone was trying to impersonating her. We found a new account copying her profile pictures and "About" section that was created on the same day. Somehow the impostor was also able to logged her out of her account and turned it into a weird state where you can't login.

If you have a desktop device, you should check whether there is a browser hijacker or a different form of malware, that would not be surprising. On Windows you can use one of the following On Demand Scanners. They are all free and don't change anything about your system configuratiom (portable)

- HitmanPro

https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/hitmanpro

- Kaspersky VRT

https://www.kaspersky.de/downloads/thank-you/free-virus-remo...

- Norton PowerEraser

https://support.norton.com/sp/static/external/tools/npe.html

- ADWCleaner

https://malwarebytes.com/adwcleaner/

- Emsisoft Emergency Kit (this one will prompt you to pick a folder which it copies the files to, nothing is installed)

https://www.emsisoft.com/en/home/emergencykit/

First to get this out of the way: I fully sympathize and hope some hn user with privileges at facebook can escalate this to the appropriate people to quickly get it resolved. This isn’t the first post of this kind. What is new however is, that non-techies are signing up for hn accounts to get things resolved. I don’t blame CrzyLngPwd for advising her to post here, I probably would be giving the same advice if a relative was involved. People working at FAANG‘s don’t log in to hn to fix their companies processes by performing ad-hoc tech support and they shouldn’t have to. We should all (whether FAANG or not) lobby management within our organizations to ensure that proper appeals processes are in place. It is in the interest of the employees as well as the company. Because while it was fine to have no appeals available when „The Internet“ was a fun hobby for a select few, it is decidedly not fine, when millions of livelihoods depend on the whims of automated appeals processes. You can bet your RSUs that governments will step-in sooner or later and institute tedious (and perhaps inappropriate) procedures set in (regulatory) stone, if the industry doesn’t manage to self regulate in an effective way. You don’t know when it’s coming, maybe the golf buddy of an influential Senator gets banned on Facebook without any recourse or the Wife of a Member of the European Parliament loses access to her Google Account and we might see this issue regulated out of existence. I‘d much rather the industry takes initiative now and solves this Problem on it‘s own. It costs some money but it’s not Rocket Science | Brain Surgery.

I hope you find help here. I am also interested to know how a non techie Mom fou d HN in the first place :-)

If you do get back in don't forget to go to Settings > Your Facebook Data and get a copy of all your data out in case this happens again.

While you're at it look at your other services such as your Google account and save your data out of them using their "Takeout" service as well.

Facebook is not the only service that locks accounts with no appeal, human contact or legitimate reasons.

A loophole folks have found to get "human support" from Facebook/Meta is to purchase an Oculus Quest. [1] I hope this helps!

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609603/facebook-account-...

Just a hunch, but did you have Facebook installed on an Android device? There's a nasty malware going around infecting older versions of Android (that don't receive security updates). It takes over your Facebook account, posts malicious links and spam to all your friends. Phone is sluggish as hell, but works.

Check if any of your friends have received malicious messages and links from your Facebook account.

The malware even manages to disable Google Play Protect. It's detected by Malwarebytes, but it returns after a restart.

Unfortunately I do not have an answer for you, but I do have some suggestions for you.

> I had 2FA enabled so I have no idea how someone managed to access my account. I am not a techie.

What kind of 2FA had you set up? If it's text messaging, this is trivial to bypass, however, if it was TOTP using an authenticator method then this seems suspicious. Please double check your email isn't compromised. My guess is they may have reset the 2FA method either via text messages or via email. Also follow the advise in the other comments regarding backdoors and/or extensions/addons that hijack your browser.

> I sent my ID to FB and have not heard anything more. I feel scared that I have sent my ID to someone that has somehow hacked my account, used my bank card, and now knows more about me than before.

Some years ago when I had to do this, it was a manual process, and so it took a few days, which may be the reason why you haven't heard anything back. Double check where you sent your ID. For example, if you sent it by email, check who you sent it to, if you uploaded it on a website, check that the website you uploaded it to is indeed facebook.com etc (also, check that it isn't an iframe by right-clicking on the see if there is any options about frames or iframes). Having said that, the process could have changed and it may be that it is automated now.

Lastly, and this may be far fetched, but try emailing Mark Zuckerberg's office at zuck@fb.com and zuckerberg@fb.com (send it to both addresses). These CEO emails often get directed to a team that can deal with things. Though, I'm not sure if this is the same with Facebook considering you're not a customer.

I wish you the best and hope you regain access. If/when you do regain access, I suggest you download a copy of your information[0]. This way you won't lose all those precious memories in the future if you happen to lose access again.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644

Since you used pounds as the currency I will assume you are in the UK, if so the GDPR applies and you might be in luck in terms of recovering your data.

If you see an option to download your data on the "account suspended" page, use it, or try to access the feature directly: https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644

That should at least give you an export of all the media uploaded by the account.

If you can't, it might be worth getting in touch with the ICO or a pro-privacy non-profit such as Open Rights Group (https://www.openrightsgroup.org) or NOYB (https://noyb.eu/en) and ask for advice on how to do a subject access request to manually get your data back, and on top of that why not request a manual review of your account suspension (the GDPR mandates that a data subject has the right to request a review of any automated decision).

I'm just going to say it. There isn't a lot you can do.

Not to be harsh but Facebook doesn't care that you're a mom, have two or ten daughters, what you've used it for, etc. This is a well known issue with tech giants, and because they give away their services for free in exchange for advertisements, you don't have a lot of recourse when trying to get other parties to help you on this.

> I am so upset because I have so many memories on the account with my Grandma and Grandad (both deceased), photos and videos of my two young daughters growing up, as well as many others.

Very big mistake. Facebook is not a government or public-owned entity, they are a private company. This doesn't help you get anything back, but in the future NEVER have the only copy of anything important on a single service. You should have a computer or USB drive (you can get them for iPhones) and store your important photos and pictures on it. At the very least make sure your important photos, pictures, etc. are on another non-Facebook service like Google Drive.

There's a lot of talk about what Facebook should do and other sympathizing/emotionalizing on this thread, but none of that is going to make Facebook do anything different.

- Factory reset your home router and update the password on it to a secure one. Get your ISP or a tech-savvy friend to help you with this.

- Work with someone tech-savvy to save the data on your home PC if you use one and reinstall the operating system. If your PC had any malware spying on you this will take care of it.

- It wouldn't be too bad to treat this like an identity theft situation. Update every password to every account you use - email, banks, etc. It's a good time to go through any online services you use and disable/delete accounts you don't use.

- Prepare for the possibility you may not get access to this account again. If someone else you know has access to your profile you should be able to download pictures and videos from that account from a computer.

- If work requires you to have a Facebook account, the only thing you can really do is try to make another one. Do this from a work computer if you can.

- If you primarily used Facebook to talk with family, try to get everyone on an alternate platform, such as Whatsapp or Telegram. I would also start collecting more direct methods of contact such as phone numbers and email addresses and make sure your phone contacts are up to date. Facebook can't take these away from you.

My condolences. Hope you get the account back. After that, please do not use facebook as custodian for you photos, post and data. Please remember FB is NOT be trusted with anything.

This makes me so angry. Nobody imposes a duty to care on Facebook (and others), so they don't. Using an online service is like walking on ice, but most people think it is solid ground.

I hope you get some resolution.

When I was at fb they had an internal email address called oops where you could forward issues like these. So maybe you can ask a friendly employee if that's still the case, and if they can help.

A relative's account was hijacked. Her name was replaced with another name, but the photos and friends list etc remained. I reported it, and FB deleted it. She created a new FB account.

The moral of the story is to backup Facebook, and never rely on it for anything that you don't mind using.

How did you first find out that your account was suspended? Did you provide your bank card to Facebook to verify your account? What are the verbatim messages you have received from Facebook?

yet another reason to move off of Facebook entirely; and to have a backup of everything.

Hey everyone, just piggybacking on this thread with an Instagram problem - maybe someone has a suggestion or a similar issue.

My account has been deactivated suddenly and I lost a lot of information that I had on Instagram - private messages, pictures and people that I followed.

I've been trying to recover it for months. I suspect that Facebook most probably is still keeping this data, I just can't get access to it. While this has been a wonderfully liberating event, I'd like to get access to my data.

Does anyone know where to request data (I'm in Europe so GDPR) even if the account is deactivated and I cannot login? If the only way to do this is to know someone at Facebook it's a bit silly.

> I am not a techie

What’s a techie?

Since when is this a Facebook support line? This account was created 6 days ago with the specific intention of getting Facebook support.

Sincerely: regard it as a blessing, and embrace being free of Facebook. There are indeed alternatives to communicating with others.

Probably your computer have an backdoor. So hackers steals your cookies to avoid 2FA and upload them on some other computer (different IP).

It's not your fault! 2FA just doesn't works as most users expect.

Few months ago this was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745097

Try to explain that was hacked account.