A few months ago my girlfriend began selling things on Facebook, and it’s been going so well that she quit her job and now works full time at home. She began an ads campaign and was being billed about 15 dollars a day for it… until this month.
Today she got the credit card bill and, on top of the normal charges she was getting from FB there’s others, usually 40 dollars every two days that are coming from FB but not showing on her Facebook settings or were notified by e-mail.
Those extra charges add up to over 1300 dollars (in addition to the normal 450) and we are currently trying to figure out WTF is going on. :eek:
For the moment what we have figured out is that getting in contact with a human being over FB issues is not easy.
Sounds like something to do with those new “promoted posts” or “sponsored posts” or whatever they’re called. You can pay to spam an ad into people’s FB feeds, and the more you pay, the more people see it.
Just a WAG, and I don’t have Facebook, but if this is anything like GoogleAds, you pay for every “click” a certain amount. For instance, if you are selling gizmos and have an ad, every time someone clicks on your “Great Gizmos” ad, it can cost from 3 cents to upwards of a dollar or more! It depends on competition and a sort of “bidding war” to pay the most for each “click” to be at the top of the list.
On GoogleAds you can limit your bill for this to a set fee - for instance, when the monthly total exceeds $40, it stops running your ad again until next month. Or you can set your monthly ad budget to $10 or $10,000 - whatever you can afford and is worth to you.
It sounds like your GF didn’t put a cap on her ad budget and is now getting charged for it. Just my WAG, based off GoogleAds experience.
I just asked her and no, she is not using the sponsored post feature.
That’s the thing, she set her ads cap to 15 dollars a day but she is being charged from 35 up to 65 per day without the extra charges showing up in the billing information on her FB account.
Hmm…then maybe she should check to be sure that “cap” is still on?!
I know that GoogleAds will simply stop running your ad until it is paid up in full - so you wouldn’t even be able to run up such a large bill without paying for it monthly - period.
Could this be some kind of scam that someone hacked into her account and is making up fictional bills? Otherwise, why would they continue to run her ads without her having paid those ridiculous fees? I don’t know of any business that would let someone go month after month without paying and still give them product. Sounds fishy to me.
I’d dispute the charges with her cc company. If charges were coming across that didn’t agree with the invoice on her Facebook account there’s no way I’d pay them. The odds of that being either an error or a scam are just huge. I’d take screenshots and print off the charges as displayed on Facebook and dispute everything that wasn’t listed. Provide the screenshots to your credit card company, and start a paper trail.
If Facebook comes back and says “the charges are legit, we just have a bug in our account site that didn’t show them” I’d demand they correctly invoice me the charges before I pay them. This isn’t cruelty, this is business. No invoice, no payment. Inaccurate invoice, partial payment. Fix the invoice, get your payment.
IF the charges ARE really coming from FB, disputing a charge is a hell of a good way to get a human to contact you.
Before leaving in the morning I told her to get in contact with the bank and see if she can dispute the charges, let’s see what comes out. Not very hopeful though, it took me 5 trips to the bank and 18 months to get those people (same bank) to update my home adress… and they still have my nationality filed as Hungarian instead of Uruguayan. :rolleyes:
The cap is on, I saw it with her last night. As for hacking her account was hacked last month, the hacker was “selling” things on her shop and asking for payment in another bank account. I think that was sorted out and the hacker at least identified but I’m nor sure if she was arrested.
In any case if a hacker would be buying FB credits through my GF account that should still show up in her billing information in the FB account information, but the mystery charges on the credit card are nowhere to be seen on FB.
From what I saw in her account settings the cap is for overall charges, impressions and clicks. They list them both separately and cap it when they add up to 15 per day.
The cap can also be on either “per ad” or “per campaign” or “per account” basis, so this is something you might want to look at.
But if her account was hacked - I think that is your answer! To note further, ads on someone else’s page / account can be charged back to you, so this might be another avenue to explore.
Really? without showing anywhere in the the account that is paying for those ads?
I would expect that somewhere it should say you are being charged this for that service, instead of simply getting the charge on the credit card without explanation.