In the middle of June, someone stole my mom's Facebook account. She asked me for help, and with so many fires to put out: gadgets to go over, articles to write, dinner to prepare, pets to care for, bachelor party to plan, it all fell apart. But now that Facebook has drastically limited its account restoration process, there is no way to get it back. A decade of my mother's digital life is over. Like just under 3 billion people around the world, my mother has saved part of her life on Facebook, mainly in photos of vacations and important events, but also on the internet of people she followed around the world. whole. popular social network. in the planet. This is her only connection to many of these people, and in a normal year to lose those connections would be devastating. But it was far from an ordinary year: like sixty others, my mother stayed home and Facebook was her only lifeline to the outside world. The pandemic has devastated our social lives and we have turned to alternative options online, but for many older people, Facebook is the only place to go. And as things start to open up, her network of associations and outfits is all over Facebook, planning without her. He didn't have two-factor authorization on her account; You have trouble remembering your passwords as they are. She could have clicked on the alert email informing her that her Facebook account password had been tampered with, but she didn't, thinking it was a phishing scam. We've been trained so well to be on the lookout for unofficial messages that we can barely tell when they're real. And thanks to the way Facebook set up password reset, with no customer service contacts to contact, no humans to reason with, no authority to protect our cause, all those memories and networks are gone.
Facebook: restore account if still on account
If you search for "Fb Account Restore" on Google, you will find twelve methods as Facebook has altered its process so many times over the years. This makes sense: as the social network has grown and also introduced more complex security methods, criminals have become more sophisticated in the way they hijack accounts. Hence, you will see (and possibly remember) certain online methods to recover your account, such as asking your friends to notify you that it has been hacked. An antidote, a procedure. But now, if someone else has accessed your account and altered the password and the restoration email, that's it. The account is gone. Well, despite everything that Facebook calls "Help Center", it only offers one way to restore the password: send it to the registered email address. You know, this has been replaced with the hacker's email address. There was a brief window to challenge the password change: if we had clicked on the possible phishing email, now there is an expired link to tell Facebook that it was a trick. But now there is no one to protect our case. The hacker has the last decade of my mom's digital life. And access to each and every account she signed up with using Fb, well you know, how Fb encourages her.