Last Tuesday, one of the accounts I manage was hacked and the email and phone number were changed. I contacted Meta Support Pros and they have been telling me the issue is ‘under investigation’ but nothing more. Stakeholders are now asking me to consider other options.
What other options do I have?
Has anyone else successfully recovered a hacked account?
Are you able to petition for your username back and verification from Meta once you start a new account?
Business Instagram Hacked — How can I recover / what are my options?
Userlevel 1
I don’t have recommendations for recovering a hacked account, but I’d suggest turning on MFA or 2FA for all of your social accounts (and email, too!). You can enable this feature in your security settings. I make it a requirement for anyone accessing our social accounts. That way, if a hacker somehow gets access to the password for the account, there’s an additional protection in place so they can’t complete a login.
I have! Our business Facebook was hacked via my husband’s personal account and after a VERY long process, I was able to work with a physical human to get it all back. We have 15 physical locations and 16 Facebook pages (+ 16 Instagram accounts) which all had to be recovered. I found that if you have a paid account or have done any sort of paid advertising, that’s the best way to get in touch with an actual person. You can go through their contact us page which usually routes you to messenger and after telling the bot you need a person, you usually get set up with them. If you don’t, it’s a big empty void. I went that route to recover our Facebook pages and then was able to use that route again when we had issues with our Instagram accounts. Facebook isn’t linked at all to Instagram customer service but I found that I could at least get someone to figure out where to send me to talk to someone. You can create a temporary page in the meantime (something like the business name with an _ or a 1 in the handle) and then shut it off when you can recover your page.
Our hackers for whatever reason didn’t kick me out of our business account but they downgraded my status so I couldn’t get them out but I could at least see who was in there. Not sure if that is the case for you or not but worth a try to see if you have any sort of access still to see who is in there. I took tons of screenshots which I then had to send to Facebook.
As mentioned above, once you do get it back, consider creating a new meta business account to move your page to and set up two step verification. You will have to have been the admin on the original page and most likely have to show proof of the ownership of the business. That takes time too and my advice, follow their instructions EXACTLY or they will keep denying you. It’s a terrible process unfortunately. Hope this helps and good luck!
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