Three ways you can lose control of your Facebook account

There are actually three different possible scenarios.

Scenario 1. You let a family member or friend “borrow” your Facebook account on your computer or phone. They proceed to consume content, post messages as you, or befriend random people. This happened to a friend of mine, who had a grandchild staying at her home for a week. The girl left town and left a mess behind on my friend’s Facebook account. “She didn’t post anything to my account, but I had odd friend requests that I had to clean up. I decided to just quit using my account.” This is more of a nuisance than a hack, but still annoying.

Remedy: First, use Facebook’s security page to check and see where else your account is already logged in.

This list should also remind you of all of the devices that you have used Facebook on in the past. I took this screenshot after I found (and then removed) an older Windows laptop that I hadn’t used in years on the list. You’ll also see an entry for my iPhone that is located somewhere in Indiana. I haven’t visited that state in years, so sometimes the geo-location algorithms are a bit wonky. Even if your account isn’t hacked, it is helpful to routinely check this screen to make sure you haven’t enabled a login by mistake.

If you don’t recognize (or don’t use) any of the devices on this list, click on the three vertical dots on the right and force those machines to log out of your account. Next, change your password to something unique. Also, remember in the future to sign out of Facebook (and Messenger) before you loan your device to anyone.

Scenario 2. Someone uses your photo and name and sets up a new account. Then they proceed to try to recruit your FB friends to their account.

Remedy: There isn’t much you can do about it, other than tell people you are still you and to ignore the imposter. This should be a warning when you receive a friend request from someone you think you have already befriended, or someone you haven’t communicated with in years. A word to the wise: send them an email or text asking if the request is genuine.

Scenario 3. The doomsday scenario. Someone guesses your account password and proceeds to lock you out of your account. This situation is the most dire, and fixing this will depend on what else you have linked to your Facebook account and how determined you are to get it back.

This happened to Elizabeth, a book author. She ended up working with two different friends who were IT professionals and a lawyer over the course of four months. She had two complicating factors that made recovering her account difficult. 

First, she used Facebook ads to promote her books, so she had connected her login to her credit cards. This resulted in the hacker charging her card with their own ads to try to lure other victims to compromise themselves. 

The second complication was that she was using her pen name and a random birthday date for her account. During the recovery process, Facebook asks that you scan your ID to verify who you are. When she told me this, I became concerned for myself. For years I prided myself on using January 1 as my Facebook “birthday.” Now she was telling me that I was setting myself up for trouble if someone hacked my account.

She eventually got her password reset, but almost immediately the hacker reset and took over her account again. “I tried to get someone at Facebook to help me, but I couldn’t get anyone on the phone,” she told me. Before the pandemic, the company had a special phone hotline for industry insiders, “but this was discontinued,” she said. She had more success blocking the credit card charges by phoning her bank. “I was trying to be a step ahead of the hacker, and losing sleep. My whole life was put on hold as I tried to deal with the situation. I got no work done for months. I ended up changing my passwords on more than 30 different accounts.”

Possible remedies: if you find yourself in this last situation, you have three basic choices:

1. Now would be a good time to leave Facebook. The trouble is, you have someone who is pretending to be you, and could leverage your identity into criminal and uncomfortable situations. Not to mention that they could try to leverage bank accounts that are linked to your account or open up credit cards in your name. (More on that in a moment.)

2. Try to reinstate your account on your own, using Facebook’s own obscure and oftentimes contradictory steps. That is the way most people I know have tried. However, you will find out very quickly that there is no easy way to do this. You have to communicate with Facebook support through someone else’s account, which seems somewhat contradictory, so hopefully your spouse or friend is willing to lend a hand. (Don’t be tempted to set up a second account, because that could result in both of your accounts eventually being canceled.) Then you have to choose one of several options (finding an unauthorized post, an account that uses your own name and/or photos) and enter the rabbit hole to recover your account. 

If you use Facebook as a means to log into other internet services, you will have to disconnect these links — otherwise a hacker can then compromise these other accounts. If, like Elizabeth, you have connected your credit card or other financial accounts, you will have to contact these institutions and get these charges rescinded. Start by trying to use Facebook from other devices you have previously used: perhaps the hacker hasn’t automatically logged you out.

3. Use a third-party recovery service, such as learncyberhacking.com.