My War with Meta

I am not sure war is the right term. To have a war, someone has to fight back, right? In the last two years I have had my Facebook page hacked, pirated and finally deleted. Try to contact Meta for help…not happening Charlie!

Last year a hacker put a post on my page that I was selling off a lot of nice stuff because I was moving and contact my niece (address provided in the post) with payment. Of course I wasn’t moving and I wish I had some of the stuff I was supposed to be selling. Fortunately, one friend who was interested in buying something contacted me before he went ahead, so as far as I know, the scam didn’t work. Then, a month or so later, a guy basically stole my identity as well as my page. He claimed under my name to be a certified Bitcoin banker and used a lot of my profile information…St. Lawrence, hometown, etc. but had a different date of birth. I messaged him, asking to take the page down and turn it back to me and he said he would for a silly amount of money. Repeated reports of the identity theft were reported by me and FB friends, but Meta did nothing, saying that it did not violate their community standards. Interesting community standards that allow that kind of fraud. My only regret was that some of my many Facebook friends probably thought it was really me. I hope none of them did business with the guy before the page was finally taken down a few months ago.

I tried to recover it using an on-line help guy, but that turned into a pyramid scam when he kept asking for increasing amounts of money over a period of a week or so to get “keys” and software reworks from Facebook. I finally balked at the fourth request for more funds so I made a new Facebook page for myself and started rebuilding my friends list. Unfortunately, that was a long and tedious process and a lot of times I got a message “You don’t know this person” from Meta when it was a close friend or relative who had been part of my Facebook clan for years.

That page, my Instagram account and my Messenger account were all disabled and apparently deleted on Jan. 4. I got back onto Instagram with a new account today and will set up a new Facebook page today or tomorrow. That Facebook page should get me back into Messenger and hopefully all will be copacetic.

These trials have created this website so I don’t have to worry about being deleted…which sounds like a bad line out of a sci-fi flick.

As for Meta, if it happens again, it’s sayonara!