Silence is NOT for an Old Woman

 October 22, 2024

Today, I should be celebrating the fact that on this day nine years ago I had a right side mastectomy. I have been a cancer survivor for nine years! Something to celebrate, indeed!

Instead, I have been calling, emailing, and texting to stop the fraud that is occurring on my old Facebook page. So, once upon a time last Tuesday, I awoke to a series of emails from Facebook announcing that between 2 and 2:30am someone had been trying to sign in my account. With those emails came the assurance that "if this was you, you don't need to do anything." By that time, my Facebook account password and email address had been changed and I could no longer access my account. I filed a report with Facebook that morning and that evening.  

After 24 hours there was no response, so I sent morning and evening reports the second day. On Thursday, I created a new Facebook account. I reached out to my "former" friends, but Facebook community standards only allowed me to send 10 new friend requests a day. I went to email and sent messages to friends for whom I had email addresses and asked them to send me a Facebook friend request. After four days, I had recovered about 140 of the over 2000 contacts I had on the hacked account. I also went to Instagram and sent messages that way.

As an educator with more than 25 years in the classroom, many of my Facebook contacts were former students. I was trying desperately to reach them about the fake account. I also directly contacted close friends and former students. 

The morning of October 21, I received a text message from a friend indicating that the hacker had posted about selling "my uncle's" things as he was moving to an assisted living facility. I sent the hacker a Facebook friend request, which was immediately accepted, and began posting FRAUD on the account. Of course, I was soon blocked. I reached out to everyone I could and asked them to report the fraudulent post to Facebook. Facebook's response was that the post did not violate their community standards and they were allowing the post to remain. It was their common response to all of those who had reported ACTUAL FRAUD!

For much of the day, I responded to text messages, emails, and phone calls from friends about the post:  they wanted to send me deposits or they asked me to hold items for them, and some wanted to see if the post was indeed fraud. Others just wanted to let me know of the post's existence. At 9:03pm, I received the text I had been dreading all day-one of my former students was scammed. She had wired money before she began to feel uncomfortable about the situation. Fortunately, she reached out to her bank immediately, and they promised to take action.

This morning, her text let me know that the money had already been wired to a bank in Texas. She lives in West Virginia. My blood was boiling! My student was a victim of fraud because she trusted me! Someone was online impersonating me and Facebook was not doing a thing about it!

My student's bank encouraged her to file a police report, and I did the same. As of this writing, the post and my hacked page remain on Facebook, but I have received notification that my new Facebook account has been shut down. My crime:  Fraud. Facebook in all of its wisdom had found ME to be the fraudulent account. 

I have reached out to my Congressman, to the ACLU, and to local leaders. Facebook is complicit in the crime of fraud. Their refusal to shut down a scammer is inexcusable.  

I am that old woman...the one who will not be silenced.