Unfairly Restricted Our Hacked Advertising Account

[jillybeanjam]

I am posting today because I need your help, but first, I will share a bit of the work my friends and I have been doing. Four long-time close friends and I started a company called Sole Sister Ramblers in our late fifties. Sole Sister Ramblers is an enterprise dedicated to connecting and empowering women in midlife and beyond, both online and in person. 

Over the past 4 years, we have worked incredibly hard to build our business, growing our audience to tens of thousands of women in multiple countries. 

Our initiatives include:

• Hosting walking groups on WhatsApp, which we call Sole Circles, with over 10,000 members.
• Developing and hosting monthly fitness and lifestyle challenges in WhatsApp groups with hundreds of women participating every month.
• Collaborating with Intrepid Travel, one of the world's largest travel companies, to host Sole Sister travel adventures.
• Hosting a vibrant Facebook group that has nearly 25,000 members.
• Publishing the Rambler Cafe Blog and email newsletter with 16,000 subscribers.
•  

Unfortunately, all of this is now at risk due to what appears to be a bureaucratic error at Meta. Despite our full compliance with Meta’s policies and our best efforts to resolve the issue we have with them, we are now facing the very real possibility of business failure, through no fault of our own.

Here is the back-story . . .

On June 16, 2024, our Meta Business Suite and Facebook advertising accounts were hacked. Two individuals we do not know gained access to our Meta Business Suite and advertising account, removed our admin privileges, and started running ads for products, specifically pants, without our consent.

We reported the incident to Meta within an hour of it happening, seeking guidance on how to resolve the issue. They responded by restricting our account and promising to investigate. However, a year later, the problem remains unresolved, and our advertising account remains restricted.

We have contacted the designated help channels weekly, opening dozens of support tickets, chatting with multiple advisors, and participating in numerous calls with various help advisors. Each time, we have been advised to remain patient and assured that a specialized team is handling our case.

Recently (almost a year to the day since it happened), we received this message: "After further investigation, I regret to inform you that your ad account will remain restricted due to not following our ads policy. We understand this is not the outcome you were looking for. Our team reached this conclusion after a thorough investigation of your account. Please note that accounts disabled for more than 180 days cannot be reinstated; consider this decision final."

Meta’s decision is a mistake. We don’t know how or why this decision was made. What we do know is that it has cost us a significant amount of money, a lot of time, and frustration, and is jeopardizing our business. We also know we have not violated any Meta policies and were hacked through no fault of our own.

Further, we have invested tens of thousands of dollars in building our audience on various Meta platforms, particularly their advertising platform. We also know we need our advertising account, as there are few other viable options for advertising our services.

We have also learned that the Meta fortress is impenetrable. A customer service agent who may or may not know the background of a decision says it is final because of a rule in a handbook, and there is no recourse. One cannot escalate the matter to anyone who can analyze the situation and ascertain that it was Meta who made a mistake, not us, their client.

The result is an arbitrary and erroneous decision made by Meta—a company with immense influence over our success—that now threatens the viability of our business. This ruling sends a disheartening message: "Your problem isn’t important enough for us to address." In doing so, Meta is not only undermining our work but also negatively impacting the thousands of women whose lives we are working to improve.

I’m reaching out today to ask for your help. If you have any ideas, connections, or suggestions that could help us resolve this situation, particularly ways to escalate the matter within Meta or reach someone with the authority to take action, I would be deeply grateful. We’re looking for any avenue that might help us get this issue in front of the right people who have the power to fix it. 

Thank you and Happy Rambling!