Since the weekend, I have been repeatedly blocked from accessing my personal Facebook profile due to suspicious activity. I believe that the suspicious activity they refer to is the three ‘boosted’ adverts I launched last Friday, previously I had only had a single paid promotion running at any one time.
I use my Facebook account to maintain a number of business listings for my employer, as Facebook does not allow for business accounts, all business pages need to be administrated by a personal account, despite Facebook’s Business Manager. It’s completely illogical to have business pages maintained by individual users on Facebook and not a company profile, administered by a chosen person or group.
Despite my account being suspended, Facebook are still taking my money for the paid adverts, which I suspect triggered this deactivation. The latest message I get when I attempt to log in says “We’re always looking out for your security, so until then you won’t be able to use Facebook”. If Facebook is so damn concerned about my security, they would have killed the adverts and stopped charging my credit card.
However, free scheduled postings that I had created are not being published, hampering my marketing efforts. This tells me everything I need to know about Facebook as a company, despite my account deactivation, anything that I pay for continues, while free services are stopped. I can’t even monitor the paid promotions, which I do to maximize ROI, sometimes canceling a promotion early because it’s not delivering, which is often the case in the property management industry from my experience.
Anyway, I digress, here’s a walkthrough of the events of the last couple of days. I logged into my Facebook account yesterday, morning, June 25, 2019, as I do every weekday morning to be greeted with a message about securing my account due to suspicious activity. Initially, I didn’t think much of it, as it’s quite common for websites to periodically confirm your identity to maintain account security.
First, I clicked the Recaptcha to confirm that I am not a robot, then it took me a page to send a text message to confirm my identity. Now, here’s the issue, the phone number I used to sign up to Facebook is a landline, i.e. a telephone, not a cellphone. After talking with our telephone service provider, I was able to receive a text message through their SMS subsystem, which unlocked my account for 30 minutes.
When I signed up for my Facebook account, I was able to verify via a phone call, an option not presented to me for the security check. Again, this defies logic, I am able to sign up and verify an account via a phone call, but not for the security check. Not everyone uses a cellphone number for their Facebook profile or uses the Facebook app on their phone, due to privacy concerns, which has been in the news recently.
Moving onto the next stage of the saga, after the 30 minute grace period, I get another onscreen message, asking me to upload a photo of myself, I took a fresh photo of myself with my webcam, and submitted it, this was, at the time of writing, 16 hours ago with no response from Facebook.
Leaving me without access to more than two dozen business pages, as I am the only admin in my employers Facebook business manager, which in hindsight was a very bad decision. If I cannot recover the account, I lose control of my employers business assets on Facebook, which is simply unacceptable.
From what I have been reading online while researching this issue, the Facebook photo confirmation process can take anywhere from 1 hour to 48 hours to one week or even never, leaving users locked out.
I have to pray that our Facebook overlords will allow me access to my account, it’s literally out of my hands as I write this. I honestly wish that I didn’t have to use Facebook, but regardless of my views on Facebook as a company, it’s billions of active users means it’s too big to ignore as a marketing resource.
Update: Jun, 27 2019, 14:02
I have my answer, and that answer is that my account has been deactivated.
My only recourse now is to send Facebook a scan of my drivers license, green card, and credit card (with the numbers blurred out) and an AT&T bill with my name on it, to prove that I am a real person. Given my experience with Facebook support overall, I’m not hopeful that this action will change the outcome.
Final Update: Jul, 15 2019, 12:29
This has been ongoing for three weeks now, and it’s time to put it to bed. Clearly, Facebook is not willing to engage with me to resolve this issue, so it’s time to move on. If I did not need to use Facebook as a business resource, I would delete my account, at this point, I’d rather not have anything to do with Facebook. But, alas, I’ve started over with the business pages, I built them up before, I can do it again.
