Hey everyone,
I am a first-time poster, but I could really use some help figuring out this situation I have found myself in.
Starting at the beginning, I received a message from my cousin, who I hadn’t spoken to in years over Facebook on Wednesday night. I responded and immediately detected that her account had been hacked, and decided to let her know. I called and spoke with her about it and offered to help her get her account back, which she accepted, and I also baited the scammer through a fake profile in order to find out any info I could about the scam.
The problem I need help with is that I can’t recover the page. As far as Facebook is concerned, its like the page doesn’t exist, despite the fact that they were actively talking to me at the time! I tried resetting the password to the account, but I kept getting messages that it was an “Invalid Username / Password.” I tried doing a password recovery, but the emails were never received. It kept saying “Invalid Email”. I tried going through facebook.com/hacked and trying to report it there several different ways. Tried searching by email, account didn’t exist. Checked by phone number, didn’t exist. Even tried checking by her name and date of birth, but nothing would come up. I then tried to figure out some way of speaking with Facebook directly about it, but they don’t offer customer service lines or online chats that I could find. I am pretty new to all of this, but to me, it seems like maybe the account may have been moved off of Facebook’s servers somehow and routed through it, if that’s possible? She ended up creating a new Facebook account and telling me to report the account to get it taken down. I have reported it 3 times already and Facebook refuses to take it down. I’m at a loss, and it is making me angry that her profile is being used to scam people, and we can’t seem to do anything about it! She also had that account as the only administrator for her business page on Facebook, and it won’t let her transfer ownership to her new account because she can’t access the old account.
If you want to give the scammers a hard time as well, my cousin’s account sent me to another Facebook page called “AHRP Program Organization Funds”. I would post the link, but I am not sure if that’s allowed. The account has a picture of Marty Walsh, former U.S. Labor Secretary as the profile picture, but the guy introduced himself as William Smith. It was a government benefits scam where they say they will send you funds to help you with expenses, all you have to do is provide them with your personal information to see if you qualify for the program, then when you are approved, they tell you to pick how much funding you want (between $10k and $2.5M), then tell you that you need to pay fees ranging from $100 for $10k up to $250,000 for $2.5M in the form of gift cards. They also kept pushing for a picture of my driver’s license, but I kept easily redirecting the conversation since I didn’t have one to provide. Just a fair warning, this scammer has apparently never heard of CAPS LOCK, so he talks in all caps, and he called ME stupid for wasting HIS time, ironically.
I have reported both accounts, but as of writing this, they are both still up 24 hours after I reported them. Any help that can be provided would be greatly appreciated!