[elevation]

I helped an elderly woman create her first FB account. She'd just lost her husband and wanted to notify his friends about his upcoming memorial service. She knew their names but didn't have contact information.

We created the account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of consumer authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity.

There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.

[burnte]

> There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.

I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.

I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.

Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.

I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.

Companies still do this today.

[pests]

I battled an online casino that did this. I had under a grand in balance but my account got locked and they needed verification for every payment method I had ever used over a 2 year period, and I had used A LOT. I would reply back immediately with all the information, etc. Took a good month and a trip to my bank to get documentation on ownership of old debit cards but by the end of it I was sending them basically a 20 page package of all the proof they needed with everything already laid out perfect. I had accumulated a bunch of internal support email addresses of various agents or systems and would CC everyone every time, by the end the email chain was 200+ messages and I had 15 people on CC. But I got it unlocked.

[teeray]

If you have the wherewithal, small claims is a secondary appeals process: https://www.keenesentinel.com/state_news/how-owner-of-teatot...

[j16sdiz]

That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.

If you mix in the spammer and bad actors, it makes sense to just say no.

The solution is, of course, have smaller social networks.

[gentleman11]

Substack also wont let you contact human support without spending days fkdskf around with its ai chatbots who refuse to ever, ever escalate to a person

[alex1138]

Some part of me deep inside that remembers Paypal in the early 2000s and their Kafka labryrinth systems thinks about Peter Thiel and how he's responsible for both Facebook and Paypal. Maybe coincidence, maybe not

[isubkhankulov]

Companies created these traps not to screw customers but to thwart fraudsters. There are SO many worldwide - see annual fraud loss stats.

Paypal and many other companies that trade in valuables have to put up protections because there are almost no reprecussions for perpetrators in certain foreign countries.

[jmaker]

Many consumer banking apps have begun integrating similar identity verification third-party providers. They are very inaccurate.

Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.

I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.

[jbmsf]

I can't speak to the accuracy, but I just integrated stripe's offering for our product (which involves banking). We were small enough for a while not to need it, but eventually the fraudsters find you.

If you don't take these measures, you will lose money to fraud. You may also lose your business because you aren't meeting your AML/anti-terror obligations. (I also just had to take my annual training course).

There are a bunch of mitigations, of which identity verification is just one, and all of them are lousy for our good customers. I wish the banking systems were better and we didn't need to do any of it.

[mihaaly]

When I researched a bank learning they want to use some third party never-herd-of identification service on me was the moment I knew I do not want to share any of my personal details and consumer habits with that so called bank. They do not care enough to pretend they keep all my data in-house.

[tintor]

Can you elaborate on this and tells us which banks?

[lossyalgo]

Name and shame please, so that we can avoid these nasty banks. I also hope you leave some bad reviews on TrustPilot.

[retired]

It sure beats the Reddit system where you think you are interacting with people, only to find out a couple of days later that your fresh account is shadow-banned and nobody is seeing your comments and that none of your likes went through.

At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.

[qingcharles]

Tip: You can always tell if you are banned on Reddit by accessing the shadowban appeal page which is only visible if you are shadowbanned yourself:

https://reddit.com/appeal

[dymk]

No, FB has their own shadowban system

[kps]

Reddit and HN.

[mixmastamyk]

Not to defend, but to understand. Last year our old "High School class of 19NN" group received about a dozen join requests per week from bogus accounts for a couple of years. At first they were trivial to discriminate because they were folks located on the opposite side of the Earth. But over time they became filled with pictures and names of (randomly generated?) Americans.

I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.

The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of the above.

[tintor]

`I could still tell because their profiles were sterile`

That is exactly example that parent posted about. Not every fb user is addicted to it, and has used it for long time.

[chamomeal]

Last year I finally caved and tried to sign up for instagram. It's tragic but it's almost like a second internet. So many small business and bands only have instagram. So many lil communities post their events only on instagram. I always have to ask friends with instagram to tell me when a brewery is open, when a show starts, etc.

So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao

[MostlyStable]

While I recognize that, as a business who needs reach, they kind of need to be using these websites where everyone is, I really wonder how difficult it would be to mirror everything they post to some more open and accessible location (a self hosted webpage, anything). I can't blame them for using Instagram/Facebook/whatever, but I can blame them for using nothing but that site. It would almost certainly get very little traffic so it wouldn't need much bandwidth and costs should be low, and it would be a lot more consumer friendly.

[kstrauser]

My sister died a few years ago. A couple of months later, someone created an account with her name and profile pic and started inviting family members. Quite frankly, I would have been ready to brawl with this person if I were in a room with them.

I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.

[lossyalgo]

That happens regularly with various family members who already have IG/FB accounts. I always have to hop on our local Signal group and warn everyone that there's another fake clone account trying to scam people. Some of us try to report the profile, but the process has become increasingly frustrating, and often doesn't even work (sorry, we couldn't blah-blah-blah so we can't/won't do anything about it). Sometimes we just have to let the scammer be, block them, and warn people outside of Signal that there are scammers running around with our family members' names. It's a total shitshow.

[kay_o]

There is automated pipeline for this generated from obituary for monetary fraud.

[BloodyIron]

It's as if all the other problems Facebook has done in the past never mattered. Nobody stops to think about how Facebook's _repeated and exhaustive history of abuse_ might actually impact them. If only there was some evidence of what might happen...

[GaryBluto]

Exactly my experience. Hoovered up my data and refused to let me in after.

[alex1138]

Mark Zuckerberg, folks. It matters when his default philosophy is "They trust me dumb fucks". Copying Snapchat 9 times is more of a priority than account security. He wasn't "making a good point". He's a malicious asshole who deserved jail years ago