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How I Recovered a Hacked Facebook Page

You always hear about people's Facebook accounts getting hacked, and often see the consequences of it (constant event invites to random sales with dodgy links). However after working around social media for so long I always thought I'd seen it all, and wouldn't be fooled like so many others before me. So when I got hacked and had a Facebook page with 25k followers stolen from me, I was left feeling like a true sucker. But I got it back, and actually found a friend in a guy who had taken me to hell and back, from a country I'd never even heard of.

It starts fairly typical of any hack story you'll find on Yahoo! Answers or on the Facebook community boards. I woke up very early on Wednesday morning to check my pride and joy, a Facebook page I'd organically grown to 25k followers in the space of 2 months. However, I was on alert as I discovered the following message in my inbox, posted by "Facebook Pages":

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See this how to hack fb account easily

I gave this a quick skim and believed it to be legit, partly because I was half asleep, and partly because I definitely had infringed copyright laws with a few of my posts. Looking back I should have noticed the grammatical errors or checked the profile that the message came from (which was a blatant fake) but non-etheless I clicked through to the link, which took me through to the page below.

Facebook phishing

Without thinking twice about it I entered my details, which directed me back to Facebook's help page. I then messaged the phony "Facebook Pages" profile from my page to tell them that it was done, and that I was waiting to be reviewed. Feeling like I'd sorted the issue, I left the page and got ready for work, promising to check out how the review had gone before I left for the day.

After getting ready I went to log into my Facebook account but was having no luck. I tried my details again only to notice that it wasn't my password that was incorrect, but my email address. In fact, it was saying that my email address was not registered with any Facebook account. I was perplexed but tried again, this time logging in with the email Facebook provides on default (Username@Facebook.com). This got me in, and it was at this point that I knew there were some serious issues.

Facebook had informed me that somebody in another region had tried to access my page. They'd done more than that.. this hacker had actually got complete access to my account, and proceeded to change the email address to a spammy looking Gmail account. Not only this, they'd posted porn images on a bunch of local pages from my account, sent several friend requests and, to my dismay, removed my admin status from my beloved Facebook page. I was freaking out majorly, and for a number of reasons. My page was a big deal, but the account was also linked to my credit card and PayPal accounts, not to mention the probability of getting temporarily banned for posting porn everywhere.