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Comment by thestepafter | Hacker News Reader

I signed up for Facebook recently after deleting my account 9 years ago. I was banned within 30 minutes after updating my work history and a profile photo. Submitted an appeal with my drivers license and passport. Unbanned in a couple hours. Kept building my profile over the next couple days and was banned 3 more times. Submitted appeals each time with all the requested information. Nothing malicious, political, or sexual posted, just the average guy setting up a Facebook account. Been banned for over a month now, finally just gave up. They never emailed me other than the initial welcome to Facebook email. Just had to try my login every couple hours to see if I was still banned.

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Sounds like facebook has a pretty effective scam for getting people to give them driver's licenses, passports and untold other treasure troves of personal information.

Twitter has been using a similar scam for a couple of years now. After several years of Twitter, my account was locked and they demanded my cell number to "verify" my account. No thanks - said goodbye to Twitter and never looked back.

It was funny because a fresh account worked for me until I confirmed my e-mail address, then I was suspended until I gave them my phone number.

If they are so desperate to not have me as a potential user, then they can have it...

I used one of those 'burner' apps that generate temporary phone numbers to bypass that. The only problem is if they continue to use that for authentication as the numbers expire unless you pay $x/yr.

In what sense do you think a driver’s license is a “treasure trove of personal information”? Especially information which FB does not already have from other sources?

Proving to advertisers that the targets are real humans must have some value. I imagine fb somewhere shares a stat that's basically "n% of users personal details are verified with a valid ID!". IE, "dear advertisers, your ads are targeting real humans. We promise."

cynical, scary, hence probably true

There's no reason why this should be down-voted it's actually probably 5% of the reason people are leaving - bad UX in the security area - they have some bad ML algo that is banning and doing this to people. Only facebook probably knows the true numbers around this problem, but it's significant - it happened to me too.

If the solution is that bad, I presume the problem is leagues worse.

You came out ahead -- you are not a user of Facebook, which is far more productive than being a user of Facebook.

I just went through the same experience trying to set up paid ads. My account was suspended for "suspicious activity" and despite sending in a photo of my credit card with my thumb over the first 12 digits they still denied me. In the end after multiple engagements it was approved.

It lasted 24 hours before it was suspended again and had to do the whole thing all over again with the same copy/pasted responses.

Their fraud system is an absolute joke.

Did you get any kind of emails from Facebook during this? I haven’t heard anything from them.

Do you have an account already? Was this some kind of duplicate account prevention measure?

No, I did not already have an existing account.

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