What is the moral to this story? – Read on to find out…..
Sometimes in life we get thrown a curveball not just a little one but a great big fat one. I was given a big fat curveball last week. Was it out of the blue I wondered? When I thought about it later I don't think that it actually was. It was the result of not paying enough attention to my intuition I suspect.
You see, three weeks ago I had my Facebook hacked by someone in Canada. Now I had an art site and on that art site as you might suspect I sell art prints. So what did this hacker decide to do? Put up an ad selling of all things - train horns - go figure.
Now, I did manage to get back into my account and kick that person off. I changed my password and so forth and I thought I had also initiated two factor authentication. Unfortunately it seems that I hadn’t done the latter as at the end of last week around the 2nd of may I got attacked again by a different hacker. This time someone in Perth and this person seems to know a lot more than the other one did.
Somehow or other I did manage to get back into my account and I thought that I changed the password again but I think that they got in and changed it back again because after that I couldn't get in at all. I'm just thanking my lucky stars that on that occasion when I did manage to get back in I had taken them off my account, where I might add, they had made themselves my partner and put up ads to the tune of $1300 chaarged to my mastercard! I deleted all those and I also took off access to all of my financial accounts such as PayPal etc.
As you can imagine when the second scenario happened, I was pretty devastated particularly after spending hours on Facebook trying to get back in. You would think that a global, multibillion dollar company would be able to set up a system that works so you can recover your account. But no they have this amazing system where you can go in to the help desk(if you can actually get into it in the first place) and request to restore your account. So far so good.
So what's the problem then, well they take you to a page where you can request to recover your account by putting in either an email address or a password. Now the only option they give you for an email address is the one that the hacker has put in so you can't put your own email address in there. This means that you have to resort to attempting a password. Well at first you think this might be OK because they say you can put in the current password or an old one. However by the time you've been returned back to that screen three times after putting in three of your old passwords and it not accepting any of them, you are beginning to see that there is no light on the horizon.
I even tried going back to an old message I've had from Facebook with a link to recover my account – to no avail just got the same old same old.
So here we are over a week later no access to my personal Facebook page, my ad account, my business account or messenger. I still currently have, fingers crossed, access to my Instagram page however I'm pretty nervous about that after reading someone else’s post today.
What did that say? Well this post was from someone who has only ever posted amazing photographs and they have been banned for life for inappropriate content and do you know what that was? It was commenting on someone else's post with 3 red hearts - a very common form of showing appreciation on Instagram! So clearly they have AI running the show and AI doesn't have a damn clue. There were 169 comments on that post and by now I'm sure there's even more from some very upset people.
So what is the solution? Well I think I'll just be taking my business elsewhere from now on. You won't be finding me on Facebook and I'll stay on Instagram until they kick me off but it won't be my main focus. Rather I shall be looking at Pinterest and TikTok to support my work instead.
WHAT HAVE I LEARNT
I have learnt to stop pushing and anxting and I found the above words incredibly helpful to me to change my vibration around this event.
I must say this caused me some serious angst for a while. And then I had to think about why has this happened to me? Does it mean I was going in the wrong direction because that was like a mini stop sign and then a Mack truck stop sign to the direction in which I was going. This is why I'm incredibly reluctant to try Facebook ever again.
I remember someone in business saying once that ultimately you need your own platform that is your own website and you need to drive traffic there because when you're relying on people like Facebook etc they can shut you down anytime. You might say Facebook didn't shut me down but the hacker certainly did and because of their incredibly non user-friendly website Facebook was no help at all. What's that saying - ;If you keep repeating the same thing expecting different results that’s a sign of insanity.'
So although it's not much consolation I think the sooner you can secure your financials if this happens to you and just move on and forget Facebook the quicker you will get your life back on track. It's a big lesson in learning to let go and also I suspect there's a lesson in forgiveness here somewhere as well. I am struggling with not being angry at the person's that have hacked me and trying to find forgiveness in my heart and even gratitude as they have been a provider of some lessons I obviously needed to learn. 'Sigh'
It is also important to understand that while losing the account is frustrating, it’s crucial to move forward without falling prey to scams promising account recovery. There are a lot of those out there too. Only go with one of those if it is recommended to you by someone you trust.
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