I’ve been hacked, so why won’t Facebook help me?
Back in February, I was in the news after I wrote a Facebook post about a stranger with ‘crazy blonde curly hair’, after being inspired to change my life by watching her on the school run for the past ten years (Mail). With regard to that and other stories, I have a Facebook page called Part-Time Working Mummy and, in the past six months, have gained almost 150,000 followers. On July 3, however, hackers set up a replica website and locked me out of my own page, removing me as its administrator. Since then, I and many of my followers have contacted Facebook more than 50 times to ask for ownership of my page back — to no avail. If you view the page content, it’s clear that it has totally changed from when I was hacked on Sunday evening: it’s now full of spam adverts. I traced the hackers and found that they have registered the fake website to a PO Box in Panama. Since then, they’ve shut the website down and stopped posting on my account, but I’m still locked out of my page and Facebook isn’t helping. Looking online, I can see that this sort of thing is a huge problem. Facebook has no systematic way of reporting hacked pages: it does stuff with personal accounts, but totally ignores people like me who have spent a lot of money boosting posts with Facebook to increase its page following. It’s unfair and frustrating. I’m hoping there’s a way to put an end to this for people like me and other businesses that have had their pages hacked and lose all control. I’m desperate to regain ownership of my page.