What happened? December 19th I woke up, grabbed my cell phone and checked my FB. I couldn’t log in, which isn’t unusual because sometimes I am logged in with my husbands account and it takes me a few tries to get my passwords right. Who can remember a billion passwords to a billion different websites? Anyways, after two tries I put my phone down and decided it was just to early and I am not thinking right. Later that morning, I checked again and I couldn’t log in again. I searched through my emails to see if FB sent me a notice. Maybe I violated some of their rules, but what would could that be… a thousand questions are running through my head. I finally find an email in my spam folder. “Someone tried to log in to your account at 2:28am”. The emails gave me a link to change my password. I clicked that link and I got a notice that the link has expired. This can’t be true. I tried again! Same thing, this link has expired! I look closer and I notice that the hacker changed my email address to his (let’s just pretend its a he, ok?) address. I can only see the first letter and the last for “security reasons”. I try a few more times and eventually I get a message to take a photo of my ID and send a new email address that I haven’t used before. I do that. 4 weeks go by! 4 long weeks! I wake up one morning and get an email saying that someone hacked my account and here is a link to fix everything. I click the link. And guess what? IT EXPIRED! I try again. Same message. I go to my FB app and don’t see my account anymore. I log in to my husbands and try to find my account and it is gone. Just gone. 13 + years of memories gone. I start panicking, crying and yes swearing but there is nothing I can do. I tried to contact FB again and just get the same responds as before, upload your ID and wait. After some research on the WWW I come to the realization that once a hacker deletes your account there is nothing you can do! It is gone.
I forgot to mention but while I waited for FB to review my account, the hackers charged FB ads to my PayPal. I did get refunded for those.
So what does this mean? My pictures and memories are gone. I loved looking back every day what we did that day in previous years. My friends are “gone”. And my biz page Sonja B Photography is gone as well. Over 2300 followers gone. All my photography gone. Well, if you click on the link, it is still there but since my personal account vanished in thin air I no longer have access to this page. Again I tried contacting FB but there is nothing they can do, nor do they care.
How can you help? Please hop over to my new page The real Sonja B and like my page. Invite your friends to like my page. Even share this post and beg people to like my page…. I was just kidding about the begging but you could. Just sayin’. And if you are a friend on FB, look me up and sent me a friend request. I am now Sonja McGill instead of Sonja Bennett McGill. If you are a client and want to be FB send me a friend request!
What have I learned? I learned about two way authentication. Which I have set up for my new FB Page. Sometimes we must learn the hard way.
