I had just notified a Facebook friend that someone had set up a fake FB account in his name and posted on his real account this advice:
If someone is pretending to be you or one of your friends you should report it here.
Here’s the most important step to prevent this sort of thing:
hide your friends list:
The next thing that happened was that Facebook suspended my account and asked for my cellphone number. I did a quick search and it seemed this has happened to a lot of people.
It then asked me to post of portrait of myself in a menu provided. I did and hit “appeal”.
This came back:
Paul, you submitted an appeal
ON JANUARY 5, 2025
Check back here for the result.
Your account is not visible to people on Facebook, and you can’t use it.
What happens next?
It usually takes us just over a day to review your information.
If we find your account does follow our Community Standards, you’ll be able to use Facebook again.
If we find your account doesn’t follow our Community Standards, it will be permanently disabled and you won’t be able to appeal again.
It seems FB has been collecting user portraits for some time in this way.
Could the request have been triggered by my alerting my friend to the fake?
It’s impossible to know, but my guess is that when you publicly encouraged your friend to report the impostor, the impostor saw it and took revenge by accusing you of being an impostor.
Hopefully this will get straightened out soon.
FWIW, I personally think Facebook and all of Meta are run by a group of teenagers with too much time and money on their hands. They routinely make capricious decisions and force their users to jump through hoops in order to recover from those decisions, without ever finding out what actually happened.
Many years ago, they did something like this to me. They demanded all kinds of confirmation in order to keep using my account. When I asked why, they just said “security”. When I asked if my account had been hacked or if there were attempts to hack it, they said no. I concluded then that they’re a gang of idiots and voluntarily suspended my account. Sadly, it seems that the problem has only gotten worse in the 15 years since then.
Apparently, Meta has already had AI-generated going for a while, but after the recent coverage, people outed them and Meta has removed them because they couldn’t be blocked. Or some such.
I don’t think so. I routinely report AI generated images and pages of locations that are so incorrect it isn’t funny. Every single time I am told there was no issue with the picture/post/page/group and there they stay.
Thanks for all the feedback. I’m still suspended. I usually notify people of frauds via message, but I guess it was a mistake for me to just post it to his feed. I keep hammering away at people to get them to hide their friends list, but without much response.
I did a whole video on this sort of thing for our local senior center. You could check it out at https://youtu.be/wZv9Fm8c2Pk