Facebook Disabled

[Phil Ward]

Morning all,

This isn’t a particularly Mac post but I thought it might be of interest to the group.

Apparently without warning on Saturday my Facebook and Instagram accounts were permanently disabled by Meta on the grounds that I’m under age. Those few of you who know me personally will appreciate that Meta asserting that I’m under 13 is somewhat weird - I'm 65 and I’ve had a modestly active Facebook account for about 20 years I think. As far as I can tell there is no appeal and no way of contacting anybody at Meta who might have the power to reverse this absurdity.

A bit of research suggests that this is a known problem. It results from a hack in which the hackers gain access to the account via a leaked password (my Facebook password was a very tough one so unlikely to have been guessed), and once they’re in, they change the date of birth of the user. This results in Facebook automatically disabling the account and provides the hackers the opportunity to contact the user directly pretending to be Facebook and offering to restore the account for a “modest” fee. I’ve not received such an email yet, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.

A further bit of research revealed that I’d possibly had warning of this. I'd had an email from Facebook a few days earlier alerting me to suspicious activity on my account and encouraging me to change my password. Sadly though Mac OS Mail decided the email was spam so I didn’t see it until it was too late.

Anyway, I guess the lesson here is change your passwords regularly (especially on social media accounts), use two-factor authentication, and check your Junk folder for significant content more often.

And the next decision is whether to start again with Facebook and Instagram. Not sure I can be bothered.

Cheers

Phil

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Phil Ward

E: phil...@mac.com (me.com, iCloud.com)

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• Freelance writer and product designer.
• Contributor to Sound On Sound magazine: https://www.soundonsound.com/search?terms=Phil%20Ward

[Derek Cross]

Blimey – a cautionary tale.

Derek

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