I’m baaack–After more than 2 weeks of being in Facebook Limbo Land. 

It took a complaint to California’s Attorney General to regain my Facebook account.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t expect much help from Facebook. If you can’t get the help pages to work, Facebook has NO customer service number or chat.
   
• Always have a backup Admin! If you are an admin for a page, make sure you have a second person (if your account is disabled and you have to create a new account, you won’t be able to claim pages if you were the only admin)
   
• Update your passwords–I’m going to get a password manager soon and update all my passwords. I made the mistake of ignoring warnings on some sites that my password was possibly compromised in a data breach.

What happened:

On 4/24 I received an email about a password request. I clicked “this wasn’t me” and stepped away from my computer to make and eat dinner. After dinner, I returned to a flurry of emails from Facebook, asking me to secure my account, and then that my password was reset, and my emails were removed from my account, and it appeared my name and profile photo were changed. When I tried to log in, I got the message that my account was disabled for violating community standards (I can only imagine what the hacker posted).

NONE, and I mean NONE, of the Facebook help pages worked for me. I even contacted Facebook’s privacy and security team, and they basically told me, “Not our job. Case closed.” (OK, not those exact words, but pretty close). There was absolutely no way that I could contact Facebook. Their customer service was non-existent. My husband posted about my account being disabled and a mutual friend sent him a Reddit link https://www.reddit.com/r/facebookdisabledme/

I read through the link (and some sketchy people were offering to help get accounts back for $$), and read that some people had success with contacting Attorney Generals of their state and California.

On Friday, I submitted a complaint to the CA Attorney General. They contacted Meta on Monday, and yesterday (Tuesday), Meta contacted me, and just like that, I got my account back!

I made a short video (1:27,below) about how to get your Facebook account back, if you lose it through being hacked