Hacked With No Help: Users Frustrated With Social Media Platforms

Locked out and out of luck.

Evan Berman, a West Hartford-based real estate professional, says he no longer has access to his very own Facebook and Instagram pages.

“I don’t know why they found me or how they found me, but they did, and it’s hurt my business,” Berman said.

Overnight, the connections he’s made over the years are gone.

“Literally thousands and thousands of contacts,” he said.

Berman showed us the emails he received from Facebook, unfortunately while he was sleeping.

The emails were warning him that someone near the Seattle area signed in as him, changing his email and phone number.

Eventually the alleged hacker locked him out of his accounts and changed his name and picture to that of actress Lily Collins.

“When I started Googling a little more, the’ Lily Collins hack’ is a real thing. It’s an international hack that’s affected I don’t know how many people,” Berman said.

Berman has spent hours with tech-savvy loved ones trying to get help from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

Both platforms have online help centers with links, articles and tips, but no direct, personal contact.

“There’s no contact number for Facebook, there’s no number that I could find,” said Berman.

He says he filled out a form that he was hacked, but it didn’t work. His accounts have somehow since been deleted.

“In your business and my business, we’re about the consumer. We’re about the customer and they should be as well,” he said.

Berman is not alone.

NBC Responds and Telemundo Responds teams around the country have heard complaints from almost 9,000 viewers mentioning Facebook, Instagram or Meta since 2017.

Almost two-thirds of those complaints have been about hacked, disabled or deactivated Facebook accounts or scams.

Texas social media influencer Cori Roberson spent four years growing her audience online and says she lost her Instagram handle in seconds.

“There’s not a contact for me to resolve this issue,” she told our NBC Responds team in Texas.

Jim Weaver, of Carrollton, Texas, told them he lost his Facebook account, too, which contained business pages just like Berman.

“I never realized that a multi-billion-dollar company cannot have customer service,” he said.

“You need to realize how these are set up and there is no customer service for you to call because you are not their customer, you are their product,” said Eva Velasquez, with the Identity Theft Resource Center.

Velasquez says reports of "social media account takeover" to the Identity Theft Resource Center have grown exponentially in just two years, from 41 in 2020 to 1,829 in 2022.

Unfortunately, the center says the only way to get a fix is through the platform itself.

“Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if the platforms had enough resources to actually be able to respond and answer these questions in a timely manner,” Velasquez said.

Here are her tips to protect your social media accounts:

If you use social media for your business, have a backup plan to reach customers.

• Use a strong password with at least 12 characters, including symbols and upper- and lower-case letters.
• Don’t repeat passwords for other accounts.
• Set up login alerts and two-factor authentication.

That’s something Berman tells us he did.

“I think that since this is such a big problem, I’m hoping they catch on to this. I’m hoping they realize this is a problem and they release our accounts back to us," Berman said.

We have reached out to Meta, Facebook and Instagram and haven’t heard back.

In the fall, Meta did tell our colleagues in Washington, D.C. that they were making investments to further help resolve support-related concerns across platforms and improve customer support.

Roberson’s account was restored almost three months later. Meta told her it was disabled by mistake.

Berman is still holding out hope as he starts from scratch trying build up his real estate contacts and connections once again.

He also had to close a credit card account after he believed one was compromised through this hack.