My complaint:
My meta account was hacked on 23-11-23
I notified Meta by email immediately that day.
The hackers gained access to our advertising account and placed fraudulent adverts using our account. They ran up bills for advertising with meta and took payments through paypal.
Up until this point we had always operated with a £735 credit limit for advertising. Meaning once our account debt reached £735 to continue advertising they took payment. If we did not pay, the adverts stopped running completely.
The adverts we have placed on meta have always been for our business and selling the same thing )we make wheels for bikes). We have never advertised anything else. Our spending has never been greater than £500 a day.
The hackers placed adverts for face filling cream using a fake website and set the daily spend budget to £16666.66. It is obvious that this wasn’t us in almost every single way, however Meta still haven’t recognised this.
Meta on this occasion allowed the hackers to run up a debt of nearly £6000.
When we managed to speak to them on 24-11-23 they froze the account and told us they could see that someone had downgraded our privileges and added themselves to our account, then placed the adverts.
We were told it would take 23-48 hrs to resolve the problems.
We challenged the payments that meta took from our paypal account by raising a claim against them. Meta did not respond to the case and we were refunded some of the money that they had taken to pay for the fraudulent debts.
We have contacted meta support many many times in the past 8 weeks and always get told the same thing, the specialised team are looking into the situation.
Meanwhile our account is frozen with the debt and we are unable to advertise.
Our business is losing thousands upon thousands of pounds and we just never seem to get anywhere.
Suggested solution:
They need to remove the fraudulents debits on our account and allow us to advertise again. They need to review our case and respond to it in a timely manner and allow us to advertise again.
