What do you think happens if your personal Facebook profile gets hacked? Until last week I naively thought it would be a simple matter of letting Meta know, and them helping me reclaim my account… The actual process has been upsettingly opaque.

TLDR; I let an old domain expire and an attacker got me banned from Facebook.

Last Wednesday I was up with my baby at 4am and went to scroll Facebook Marketplace, as you do. I was logged out. I tried to recover my password but no text ever came through with a verification code. I simply couldn’t get back in. Trying again I noticed the primary email listed was not my email anymore. I’d been hacked.

The attacker has since put up content that has had my account suspended, to be deleted within 30 days. What I have discovered is that there is no way to speak to anyone at Facebook about this, no way to get your account reinstated, no way to get the photos, connections and memories back. I have gone from a regular Facebook user (15 years with a profile) to nothing. One bad actor is enough to erase you and Facebook do not give a damn.

The attack

I’m still not sure how I ended up in the attackers crosshairs.

My best guess is that an old email [email protected] was involved in a data breach.

Years ago I had a blog called Happy Tree Pose, about yoga and other bits and pieces. Eventually I stopped writing it, and let the domain happytreepose.com expire. I had forgotten that I’d setup [email protected] as a recovery email on my Facebook account. I switched across to a more current address 10 years ago, and didn’t think that i