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Published: 31st January 2024

Facebook

With over 2 billion worldwide users, Facebook is a favoured online forum to share our lives. However it is also popular with hackers, who gain control of people’s personal accounts and use the site to scam us.
Watchdog spoke to Jemima from Devon, whose Facebook account boasted over 400 friends. She told us that she first recognised there was a problem with her account when a friend contacted her in December last year asking if she had been hacked.
“He'd sent across the image that had appeared on my profile and it was crypto currency related. So I immediately went into panic mode.” She said.
Jemima told us that she straight away tried to access the account but had been locked out. The hackers had started using her profile page to show fake crypto currency adverts mixed amongst personal looking posts using her own pictures to make the page look authentic. Jemima told us that her friends were falling for it.

“Unfortunately one of my friends did actually invest because she thought it was me’ and that she felt ‘completely responsible”. She added.

In trying to regain control of her account, Jemima attempted to contact Facebook using eight different departments, but she received automated responses, and no direct help at all.

She told us: “I’ve lost all faith in it. There's no customer service. To me, it just seems like they don't care.”

Watchdog also spoke to Alyson and Mark from South Wales. Mark’s Facebook profile had also been hacked and was being used to sell fake Football tickets on a Facebook tickets site. The first the couple knew of this was when Alyson started receiving messages from people she didn’t know. She said that they were telling her that her “husband had scammed them”, and were also unable to access the compromised profile.
In contacting Facebook, Alyson also received an automated response saying “we reviewed the profile and it doesn’t go against community standards”. And so the hackers continued using Mark’s name to sell fake tickets. However the messages from the scammed football supporters also continued and turned increasingly threatening in nature, as Alyson explained:
“For 3 weeks I didn't sleep at all, because I really thought somebody was going to be coming to the house... I don't actually think I will ever get over it.” She said.
With seemingly no response from Facebook, and still locked out of his account, a solution came from an unlikely source. Mark, together with his family and friends, started putting angry emojis on every advert for tickets they could find coming from his profile which then caught the attention of the scammer.

Mark told us what happened next:

(The scammer) “came to me and said how can we stop this? And I said well send me the email and the password and I'll have my profile back and I'll stop it. We managed to get it back and then be able to delete it.” He said.

He also shared his frustration with Facebooks responses:

“It's disappointing from Facebook's view. They didn’t want to know.” He said

In response to our case studies, a spokesperson from Meta, who owns Facebook, commented:
“We have secured the account brought to our attention. We take the safety and security of our community seriously and encourage everyone to create a strong password, enable two factor authentication and to be suspicious of emails or messages asking for personal details. We also have a feature called Security Checkup to help people keep their Instagram and Facebook accounts secure.”