My wife opened her Facebook account yesterday and it had a screen telling her to provide a video identification to get into her account. After some false starts she finally did this (hampered by a crappy camera and the fact that when she moved her laptop far enough away to get her full face in the little window she couldn’t read the prompts they wanted her to follow).
Now she has received an email saying her account has been locked, and she has 180 days to appeal before it is permanently disabled. We have no idea what prompted this from Facebook - she uses Facebook to connect with family and friends and to play games.
The email gives no information about how she can actually register an appeal, and of course the Facebook site has no contact information. Does anyone know what she can do to get account access restored?
I wonder if her account was hacked and then used for some nefarious purpose. I don’t know how that works, but I have one friend whose account was hacked three different times.
Misrepresenting your identity in order to to mislead or deceive others, evade enforcement or violate our Community Standards, including impersonating someone
That’s what I would assume. One of her facebook friends or groups that “she” posted to about duct cleaning or car detailing probably reported it.
From the stories I’ve heard, it seems like about half the people just give up and start a new account.
I did get my account locked once, by a scammer. They had hacked a friend’s account and were asking me for money. This was the first time I’d ever heard of this particular scam, but I had a feeling that’s what it was. I asked the person a question, easily answerable by her but not by a random person that didn’t go to college with us. The person unfriended/blocked me, presumably so I couldn’t write anything on their page, then reported my account as having been hacked, which meant my account got frozen and I couldn’t post anything at all.
Somehow I managed to get my account back, but she had to start a new one.
I didn’t think you needed to provide ID to setup a FB acct; how then would a video prove you’re who you said you were when you setup the acct & didn’t give them any proof? Do they make you show a gov’t issued ID also?
Anyone can create one without ID, my dog has one, but you definitely do need ID to create a “Facebook Developer” account. This is needed for creating Facebook apps, like games etc, that harvest data. They are not terribly strict about what kind of ID, perhaps because it is impossible to verify, say, ID from Thailand without a request to the Thai government.
I know (well, I guess with great certainty) that my countries, South Africa and Zimbabwe would just not do anything at all with such a verification request.
According to my brother, who uses Facebook every day to maintain semi-friend/semi-professional (he works in Hollywood) contacts, Facebook is cool with a certain amount of fundraising, such as gofundme, but doesn’t like it when that’s pretty much all you do with your account.
If an account is one appeal after another, and lacks other content, it usually gets deleted, even if they are honest appeals for real charities, and not scams.
I wish you luck. Same thing happened to me. And I appealed, that was denied with out any explanation. Of course I could not actually talk to a real person to find out what the hell was going on.
And then, like magic, it started working some months later.
The really weird part is that I rarely use it. The only thing I use it for is when we board the dogs (so maybe once a year). The kennel posts pictures of the dogos on facebook.
I hate facebook. Soooo frustrating. Again, good luck.
Well actually (sorry!) there are services to which you can submit a South African ID number and receive within seconds the full name, civil status and a copy of the ID photo from Home Affairs. No idea about Zimbabwe though.
They regularly delete posts off the Facebook neighborhood page I administrate, and it’s frustrating as hell because they’ll say they deleted a member post, click here to see what they deleted and I click on it and always — always — get a message saying they can’t show me, the admin, the post because it violates community standards. How in the hell am I supposed to moderate that poster if I don’t get to see what they wrote? I’ve had shit I wrote get blocked years down the line, and I’ve never written anything remotely controversial on Facebook. And then I couldn’t see those posts either, so I’m left with the mystery of my supposed transgressions.
FB is a joke, but for some things, it’s the only joke in town.
I am currently locked out of one of my FB accounts, and it wants me to give them a phone number. I guess they are going to send me a text to reactivate my account. Have no idea what I did wrong, of course, because…wait for it!..I can’t log on!
I only use it now for a couple of groups that I belong to, so I can post and see what’s posted there. My own feed is a nightmare of weird behavior. I wish I could drop it altogether.
My 2¢ for my account, which wasn’t blocked, but hijacked:
One of my friends sent me a Messenger message that said that her account had been frozen, and she needed a friend to send her some code to unlock it. Since this was someone I knew, I did, and. . .
Within five minutes my password, email, and phone number had been changed, and I was locked out. I went thru the facebook procedures on how to recover a hijacked account, but when I got to the last step to complete the recovery, the button to press was grayed out. I guess the bot that took my account also did some damage to my phone to circumvent recovery. The way I had to take a picture of an ID on a device where I had previously accessed facebook. Luckily, I had my work phone, which I rarely use, and that worked. So after about two hours, I had my account back. Still don’t know how responding to a message without any attachments in which I gave no personal info allowed me to become hijacked.
I did a charity event; they took a bunch of pics. Two days later I got an email, “Hey, thanks for participating, go look at all of the pics…on our FB page”. Ummm, no; one can’t w/o a FB acct.
Even worse is when governmental agencies put important or even vital information there & nowhere else. If you want people to avoid an area because of a shooting/fire/water main break you need to make it available far & wide; not lock it behind T&C of a third-party service that not everyone wishes to use. There are services that one can use that will push one post multiple places - FB, Insta, X-witter, your website, etc. Use them.