Report a scammer or impostor on Facebook and you could get locked out

Report a scammer or impostor on Facebook and you could get locked out

Spies? Check. Condescending? Check. Baffling policies? Check and double-check. It’s time for another round of “Wait Until You Hear What Facebook Did Now.”

On any other social media platform, if you report someone is posing as you, the company goes after the miscreant. But not on Facebook, where you’re treated like a criminal.

That’s right. If you report to Facebook that someone is impersonating you, you’re the one who gets locked out of your account. Now you know why #FacebookLockout is trending and why you should tap or click here to see our 10 reasons you should dump Facebook.

Singing the Facebook blues

It’s not unusual for a person to get kicked off a social media site for being a major jerk. But to have your account suspended because you reported someone was impersonating you? That’s just plain dumb — which brings us to Facebook.

Cory Comer, a director of marketing for RateLinx, told Mashable he was locked out of his account for a week after reporting someone was impersonating his friend on Messenger. Making matters worse, Comer manages his company’s Facebook page, so no one else could access the page at all.

After initially being locked out, Facebook asked Comer to upload a form of identification for verification purposes.

The function didn’t work.

He also couldn’t contact Facebook for help because it required him to sign into his account — from which he was already locked out. So Comer took to Twitter with the hashtag #FacebookLockout in an attempt get Facebook’s attention.

Despite his many hurdles, Comer is one of the lucky victims. He was only locked out a week, compared to others who have been in the Facebook hoosgow for a month. Though he has regained access, Comer will continue to wave the #FacebookLockout banner across Twitter until someone at Facebook explains what’s going on.

A spokesperson from Facebook told Komando.com the company “worked quickly to fix an issue where we unnecessarily asked some people to verify their accounts after they reported account impersonation for someone else. We’ve removed this request and restored access to the affected accounts.”

Quickly? Tell that to the Facebook users who were locked out for a month.

5 Stupid ways Facebook takes advantage of its users

The lockout is par for this course, since Facebook always somehow manages to find more ways to invade our privacy and bungle its offerings. Here are some of the company’s little mistakes that occurred this year alone:

  1. Despite pulling billions of fake accounts in May, Facebook missed about three dozen fake accounts that spread malware for over five years. Tap here to learn what took Facebook so long to figure it out.
  2. Images uploaded to Facebook contain code that communicates with advertisers — letting them track you wherever that image travels. Click to learn what images Facebook had access to.
  3. A security flaw in the already controversial Facebook Messenger Kids app is putting your child’s privacy and safety at risk. The flaw allows complete strangers to chat with children. Tap here to see why Facebook naively thought this would be a great app for kids.
  4. In April, 540 million records were exposed by third-party developers. Click or tap to learn see if your information was exposed.
  5. In September, 419 million accounts were found in an unprotected server. Tap to see why Facebook didn’t even try to protect you.

This summer, it seemed as if Facebook would be held accountable for its careless disregard of users’ data when it was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission, but for a company as wealthy as Facebook, the fine was just a slap on the wrist. Tap or click here for more details on the $5 billion settlement.

Remember, Facebook doesn’t care about its users, as evidenced by the need for #FacebookLockout.

Tags: Facebook, malware, security, X (Twitter)