Meta and Facebook are being overrun by hackers and scammers – and they DON’T CARE AT ALL.

Once again, I can’t like, share, comment, or interact with my friends on facebook for 2 days. I keep trying to communicate with Meta support, but they are rude, dismissive, and they refuse to even acknowledge the information I have been sending to them.

I keep getting locked out of my account for literally no reason at all, and then my account gets restricted for 2 days, again, for literally no reason at all.

I am a website developer. I manage over 60 business pages for myself and my clients. I have been in business over 30 years and am a real person and a real business. This is interfering with my business.

All I was doing was “liking” some of my business pages, with my other business pages. This is my right to do this. No, my account didn’t get hacked. I am following pages that I manage, with other pages that I manage. This is not against the terms of use. My clients actually do know each other and go to events together. My clients WANT to follow each other.

There is no reason for Meta’s AI to punish me every time i use my business pages for legitimate business purposes.

I constantly report scammers but Meta IGNORES my reports of actual scammers. The scammers are allowed to keep scamming for months and years with no punishment. Their accounts rarely get removed or even restricted.

When I try to perform legitimate marketing tasks with my business pages for free, Meta’s AI restricts my account. This happened to me last week for the same reason. I have to keep confirming my account over and over again and I was then told that I was restricted for 2 days for not following community standards. I went to the Account Security page and it says there are no restrictions on my account. But I’m definitely being restricted for 72 hours at a time. This is the fourth time in the past month.

I’ve literally done nothing wrong.

The crazy thing is that I’ve been verified (not paid verified but free verified) for YEARS. A few of my pages have 10k+ followers. At some point, I started getting notices that “since you have large pages, we need to verify your identity and turn on 2 factor authentication”. So I’ve had my Drivers License, Credit Card number, and other sensitive personal info on file at facebook for years in order to verify my account. I have to re-upload it every 2 years because of my high profile pages. And I also have an authenticator app that I use each time I log into facebook that does 2fa for me in addition to receiving a text message confirmation code each time I log in. Once your pages get enough followers, you’re considered “Influential” and they simply won’t allow you to log in without verification and 2fa. In addition to this, they recently forced me to set a pin number for my messenger, so I can’t use my messenger unless I also put in a pin number in addition to the authenticator app and the text confirmation codes. So being forced to log in with these codes constantly is ridiculous, time consuming, and totally unneccessary.

It seems like when I report a lot of scam and spam pages to facebook in a short period of time, not only do they ignore my reports and allow the scammers to continue to target facebook users with no restrictions; they also retaliate against me by restricting my account for 72 hours.

In my opinion, I truly think that some of the facebook employees are either taking money from the scam and spam accounts to turn a blind eye. OR it’s possible that some of the meta employees ARE the scammers. Nothing else really makes sense.

Basically, there are international gangs of criminal scammers who steal business pages. There are publicly visible facebook groups where these criminal gangs buy and sell facebook pages. They give them ratings, according to how many followers the page has, what country they’re in, and whether the page has been monetized and how much money it makes each month. Thousands of pages get stolen each month.

These criminals have learned that if they temporarily deactivate the pages, and then merge the bigger page into other smaller pages, it becomes almost impossible to see the real page creation date and original page ID. So the original owner of the large page might know their page ID, but if their bigger page has been renamed and merged into a smaller page, all their posts are deleted, and they can’t find the original page ID anymore to try to recover it.

These are really advanced gangs of criminals. They’re getting smarter and better at committing these crimes.

Sometimes I SEE the page change in my notifications, like on March 1st, 2024 when BaddieWinkle’s page changed to baddiewinkle and started posting low quality clickbait spam. When I see that a huge page I follow has been stolen and renamed, I start to report every single post they make as fraud/scam, and I also leave comments on their posts warning the other followers that the page has been stolen and not to interact with it to protect themselves.

Meta’s AI has started to punish me for those comments too. There are about a dozen other people who also stalk the baddiewinkle page and comment about how it was stolen from Helen, and facebook HIDES our comments so it’s really hard to see them. Meta also randomly punishes us with restrictions on our own accounts. I believe that this is because some of these criminal gangs have either infiltrated Meta’s employee pool, or because they are bribing them.

If you only knew how horrible their support is. The rude and condescending way that they respond, and how hostile they are when you ask them to explain some of this stuff is bizarre. I told their support reps ALL of this information, and they didn’t acknowledge it at all. They said they would call me at the date/time that I specified, but they called me 2 days late, at 2am, from a really suspicious looking number that my phone marked as “Possible Spam”, so I didn’t answer.

NONE of the international scam gang pages that I have reported have been removed or returned to their owners. I have been talking to the other sleuths about this who also report these pages, and they experience the same thing – having their own accounts restricted in retaliation for reporting the stolen spam pages.

And then after I spend all day reporting scammers and spammers from my own account, if I switch into my Green Web Design account and start doing marketing tasks with my own account, all of a sudden I’m logged out. I receive an email telling me that my account has been hacked and that I have to re-verify my identity. Even after I go through the process to prove that my account wasn’t hacked, they then tell me my account is restricted for 2 days for “violating community standards”. But in reality I am locked out of doing most things for 72 hours or more. When I look at my account security page, it says there are no restrictions. When I contact support, they do not answer ANY of my questions and eventually, they get hostile and close the ticket.

I’m not the only one having this experience. We have groups where we discuss the scams and share hacked pages that need to be reported. Everyone who tries to report these hacked and stolen pages is similarly targeted for random punishment by the AI.

I wish their were some attorneys who were willing and able to look into a class action lawsuit. It’s absolutely maddening that it appears that Meta itself is protecting these gangs that are stealing and selling pages. The fact that they’re doing it in PUBLIC facebook groups with no repercussions is insane.

Also, the fact that i can report the same stolen spam page every day for 2 months, along with a dozen other people also reporting it daily, and facebook punishes us for reporting it. Meanwhile I can’t “Like” and “Follow” my own pages with my other pages, without getting logged out and told that i’ve been hacked, and forced to re-verify my identity. Support won’t discuss it.

I tried several times to open a support ticket about this, but the employees are all overseas. They called me 2 days after the time and date we had agreed on, and they called at 2am when I was asleep and didn’t leave a message, and then closed the ticket because they couldn’t reach me.

It’s beyond bizarre. Meta is either doing this on purpose because they benefit from all of the clicks and traffic and from having an artificially inflated user count due to allowing tens of thousands of scam accounts to flourish on their platform, or perhaps the employees are actually the ones stealing the pages and selling them. I honestly don’t know what to think anymore.

Whenever you see a HUGE page with 80k followers that was just created last month and only posts clickbait spam and scams, it’s 100% a stolen page that was renamed and had all the content deleted and merged with other pages so that the original owner couldn’t find it again.

It’s a huge industry for them to steal these pages and sell them to the highest bidder. Facebook is 100% aware that this is happening on their platform, we’ve all told them countless times and pointed out the examples of pages that are hacked, and the groups they are sold in. 

Some other possible motives for Meta to ignore the stolen and hacked accounts: For some advertisers, 90% of their paid interactions were from spammers and scammers.

A conservative estimate is that at least 25% of facebook ads are being purchased by hacked accounts and spam accounts. These ads often contain malware or suspicious links. One of the side effects of the scammers stealing these monetized, large pages is that if they can steal the business manager, they can get away with running ads for quite a while using stolen credit cards and credentials. This is one of the many reasons that my sleuthing group pretty much all believe that facebook is allowing the scammers and spammers to go unpunished. They generate more profitable traffic for them than us small business owners ever did.

Another possible motive is that they’re the number one social media platform when it comes to the number of users. But if 50% of their users are just scammers and hacked accounts, and if their shareholders KNEW THAT, it would destroy their business. Facebook does still drive a lot of real traffic too. But unfortunately it drives MORE scam traffic than real traffic these days, thanks to Meta coddling the scammers and punishing anyone who tries to report them.

Someday, they’ll probably be exposed for all of this and more. But right now they’re raking in millions of dollars because of the scammers and spammers and inflated user count, and inflated traffic from all of the hackers and scammers and spammers.

I also recommend that my clients start pinterest, instagram, and other profiles. They don’t have to use them often, but just to have a presence and a following on a different platform is good.

The most important platform to promote is your own website, because not only will Meta restrict or delete your account with no warning and no reason if they feel like it. But some day Meta and other poorly run platforms will fall apart because of the scams, hackers, and spam. Just look at what happened to Twitter! It’s not even relevant anymore.

If you keep all your eggs in one basket and don’t have any other baskets standing by “just in case”, that’s going to be a huge problem when the inevitable finally happens.