Hacker claimed ownership and then deleted my Facebook Page of 50k users

Sometimes company legal teams can be the most accessible way to draw attention to something like this, and I don't mean in a combative way. They're very risk conscious, they see a '10+ years of building a heavy metal community, gone like a puff of smoke' in terms of risks, both of bad publicity but also if you were to somehow litigate because of the damage to your business or project. Often they have an email address that is manned because they have to respond to legal requests of various types.

You can potentially request all your data (and data about the hack) and let them know why, maybe reach out asking how you can get law enforcement involved and who you should contact after you've made a police report. It's not a threat, but it get it on somebodies radar. If you express how devastated you are there is potential for them to help. They also have a lot more latitude than any kind of helpdesk (especially at the scale of Facebook, and the users/customers facebook has).

They're also well connected with-in an organization because they have to sign-off on all kinds of projects and risks.

I think `patio11` has amazing advice is a similar vein[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1162561822248992768?lang=... (I think he has a longer version/reference, but I can't find it)

Probably not the advice you're looking for, but looks like you have a blog also and am assuming that some/many of your subscribers also look at your blog. So, you may want to use your blog to spread the word about losing your page so that your subscribers know what's happening and you don't lose many of them.

In addition, while you should keep looking at ways to recover your FB page, but you may want to take this opportunity to create a more traditional forum of your own.

You may want to look at AVSForum.com, Home-Barista.com and others for ideas on how to structure very successful traditional review/forum sites and while it may be more effort initially as you'll have to build it yourself, in the long run it may be more fruitful for you.

Either ways, Good Luck!!

Update: I updated my blog to reflect the discussion taking place here: https://metalised.wordpress.com/2022/01/27/metalised-faceboo...

Thank you everyone for your support and vivid discussion. I hope this manages to reach the right eyeballs eventually!

----

Further update: I can't edit the post itself anymore, but someone from Meta reached out! Thank you so much, kind stranger, and thank you HN! You rock!

Universally necessary services like communication, healthcare, and social media (the digital plaza) can never be justly managed by private companies. It is an inherent structural contradiction that has failed and will continue to fail our society until we are willing to organize resistance beyond the realm of consumer choice.

You can do this on Reddit. No matter how successful and busy a subreddit may be without the presence of moderators, you can request ownership of a subreddit if the moderators have not been active in some time.

I found this out when someone did it to me. I had an account that I only used for moderation duties. I didn’t need to post on it. My community was doing just fine.

Well, Reddit transferred it to someone else and they turned it into an SEO spam generator.

Not at all the same, and only a minor annoyance but a new twitter account i made a few days ago just disappeared completely with no notice or reason. I think it maybe got flagged as a bot not sure. I made it, added my real name, a picture, and followed a bunch of people I knew. Then "account not found" like two days latter but I was able to remake the same exact account. Feel a bit gaslighted. did I just imagine making it lol?

I've heard that Facebook doesn't actually hard-delete any information, so odds are that when support gets back to you sometime this year, they'll have admin tools that will allow them to reactivate the group.

I went through something similar and this brings up some very bad memories. Facebook is way too lenient about taking away control of pages. Saddens me to know years later that things still have not changed.

You're going to have to reach someone who works at Facebook. Going through official channels can be an exercise in extreme frustration. It shouldn't be that way at all but it hasn't been a priority for them to do better.

Your best bet is to get ahold of actual Facebook engineers, and this is a good place to do it. Take this issue to Twitter as well. It looks like your previous posts didn't make it to the front page, but with any luck this time you'll get some real traction.

The suggestion in a previous thread about buying an Oculus to get priority customer support is also not a bad one.

Do you have any snapshots of your membership base? Maybe you can reach out and start anew. Check your email, as it'll typically have a lot of names and accounts. Also see if archive.org and archive.is have snapshots.

If and when you do get your community back, I'd highly suggest starting an internet forum and directing some or all of your community there.

I'm sorry this happened to you. I can't imagine what you are going through.

Obviously keep trying to reach Facebook. Whether you are successful or not, you need to get your community off of Facebook and onto something you can control, whether that is a forum or chat community.

Start trying to get in contact with other major members. Start giving out a URL to track community updates. Setup Discord[1] or Matrix or something for two way communication.

If you need some hosting or a domain, drop me a line and I'll see if I can help get you sorted.

[1] - Discord is only marginally better than Facebook and you risk the same problem here. Treat it like a temporary fix, not a solution.

So sorry metalised, not much you can do and no legal recourse/appeal as you have agreed to the TOS. FB will not help much either.

The a lesson to be learned here. Zinga learned that with Farmville in other circumstances. If you can, don't build on the top of some other companies, a FB, an Instagram, Pinterest, or a Gmail/Maps. Rug pulls do not happen solely in crypto.

There are exceptions of course: build something good on the top of salesforce and if you get traction (=paying customers) they will buy you.

More and more posts on HN are written to show how evil those companies are (Amazon to their third party merchants, Google or Facebook to their users), but you have choices in life, simply build a different model. The lesson is: don't build your whole business with faceless companies, even worse if you don't pay for the services. What do you expect in return?

These big companies don't much care about people who don't fit into their plans.

At one point I was 4 years into a Blogger blog when someone decided to create Google+, insisting that everyone needed to supply their real name. When I signed up for G+ with my blogger alias, they shut down access to the blog until I complied. Since I was (miracle!) 'free to export' 4 years of blogposts, I did ... and each and every one of the exported posts had a Google link embedded in it.

In short: to 'free' automated services - despite any cozy feelings of 'belonging' we feel - we are insects. 'Community' isn't in their vocabulary.

Too late now, but it's a good idea to keep your own backups of all your FB data. There is a well-hidden option under the settings to make and download a zip file with all your posts, comments, photos, everything. Worst case this can be used to rebuild your community elsewhere.

This won't help you but Facebook seems to have zero interest in such things. After spending thousands in ads my account got finally blocked early 2021 appearantly for advertising the masks my grandmum was selling on Etsy. Appeals were commentless ignored. I lost access to several big groups and pages.

The same happened a few years before with my last real name account, first they asked for my passport, pictures, identifying friends and then still commentless blocked me, removed my pages and groups as well as my semi popular apps.

The reality is Facebook doesn't care.

And if you build any kind of dependency or business around it you are playing with fire.

How did they hack you? Did you click on a link in a message which installed some keylogger on your computer? Or did you have an easy to guess password? Did you have two factor authentication?

Yikes! Clearly this is post of a bigger scam with that “Verification“ message. Wild that they do nothing about it.

There must be some Facebook engineers on here, so hopefully this gets some visibility.

Not a response as a solution to Op: is there any recommended open-source project that can be used to self-host a comminity server?

I would expect that as a host I just need to focus on configuring and maintaining instead of learning to build a website, for example, it sounds like hosting vpn using Wireguard.

On the other hand, I wonder if that really makes it better off than to use fb/discord, since if fb/discord is vulnerable to hack, so is my own hosted one.

Someone once took control of a personal Facebook account for a friend of mine, which was connected to his Business Manager and all the campaigns he was running.

We still have no idea how that guy took control since the account had the 2FA setup, but still. No way to contact FB, no help at all, we ended up nuking the cards connected to the BM and restart his profile from scratch.

Facebook won't help you in any way.

Did you have 2FA? If yes, contact https://krebsonsecurity.com/

This is yet another many postings on HN recently that used term hacker as the culprit for what essentially a potential crime committed by cracker or intruder. You won't call a robber, an entrepreneur would you?

Using the word hacker for those doing illegal activities just undermine the hackers community. Please use the correct terminology for the benefit of the relevant societies and communities.

Do you know how you got hacked? I mean did you have 2FA? phone number? Did they manage to get around a plain old password that was weak enough to brute force? I'm surprised that facebook wouldn't be like "you tried 10 times, go away and try again in 24 hours".

I’ve forwarded to a friend at FB. Will let you know if he’s able (or willing) to do anything :)

Consider putting it on Telegram, as you may know Telegram is growing faster than ever before.

Same thing happened to a friend of mine with an anime page. She never got it back.

Any chance you can share the topic of the FB group? I'm curious to know if it was politically motivated (even non-political topics can have their own, internal politics, too). Maybe someone is trying to silence you?

Is it possible that, after you finish grieving for this loss, you'll come to see deleting your facebook as the best thing that has ever happened to you?

You just got your life back. Congratulations!

sorry dude, its gone. It is not deleted though, it is merged with larger page they are building. I know because something similar happened to me ( I allowed it to happen out of curiosity. )

I had similar experience with my facebook page of 200k+ likes but facebook didn't even care to reply

Just a few likes, but it happened the same to me, It was important for me, though.

Plot twist: OP is the hacker trying to get control over a recently deleted community :)

Just kidding

Someone usurped your voluntary serfdom of facebooks property by displacing you in favor of them.

Facebook may say you "own" your page on their service. They are lying.

I'm sorry that this happened to you. What i am about to propose is not a solution for you for now unfortunately. But maybe something to help for the future...Have you considered starting a new presence for yourself and your community on the fediverse (e.g. mastodon, pleroma, diaspora, friendica, etc.)?? This will take work and time of course and maybe not all members will follow you over, but if you start a new community on one of the existing fediverse instances - or even better and more resilient, start your own instance - then facebook or other entities will not be able to let this happen to you/your community again. (Granted you can of course get hacked in your new world, encounter negativity, etc...But you will likely be in better position to do something more for yourself than what FB is/isn't doing.)

Step 1: Research the topic of the fediverse, and specifically find options for you to sign up for accounts...Yes, plural acounts...so you can get a flavor for the differnce in apps, instances, existing communities and so on. "Try" before you "buy". See also site like: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse

During this step, if you can still access the legacy FB community/page as a participant, inform your peers that you're trying this fediverse thing out, and if they're interested in experimenting with you. The more that can go along for the ride, the merrier!

Step 2: Sign up for a couple of different accounts, join some existing communities. No need to be shady nor too secretive, be honest with folks that you're testing the waters...and of course be respectful; that helps new members. Get familiar with using the tech (since there are nuances and differences to how conventional social media typically operates, new vocabularies, etiquette)... Do not research about setting up your own instance...just get comfy being a regular user, and understanding the rhythms of the fediverse. And, if some members from the legacy FB page did in fact join you in this experiment, ask them what they think so far.

Step 3: Decide which community to stay with in the fediverse (maybe re-create your "true"/"final" account), and then start inviting community members from legacy FB page. I should clarify that like FB, you are not restricted to only 1 community...you can join as many places as you wish.

Optional Step 4: After some time, if you're really into the fediverse, want more freedom, etc...Research setting up your instance/community...or look for providers that you pay for managing the infrastructure for you. Nothing is free - you either invest time/money managing system yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.

Good luck, and again, sorry that this happened to you in the first place!

Facebook is a cancer, take this as a sign to start your own social network. There's lots of 'off-the-shelf' scripts you can use (see codecanyon.net)

You can rebuild your community in no time and make it better than it was.

Thousands of years later, we’re still realizing impermanence is a thing, yet keep on keeping on trying to ignore that fact.