Small Saskatchewan businesses are losing customers as a result of social media hacking. One business was only able to get help from Meta Facebook once the media stepped in.
Rochelle Annala, owner of Bibs and Boots Fabric in Outlook, Sask., said her business’s Facebook page was hacked in November 2022.
“I realized I wasn’t able to post on my business account as the owner or the admin, I was removed,” Annala said.
She described it as if she could only see the page as if she was a customer and had no administrative controls at all.
Annala reached out to Facebook and was told her someone had stolen her business advertising account.
“They told me it usually takes them 24 to 48 hours to reinstate it and to remove the people that stole it.”
However, after five months of not being able to reach her customers and mysterious $1,000 charges on her credit card, Annala still didn’t have access to her account.
She claimed to have been messaging Meta Facebook at least three times a week and always received the same response reading, “we are looking into it.”
“It shouldn’t take that long to get my name back on it as admin. It should be fairly simple.
“I don’t know how much business I have lost because we haven’t been able to answer anyone’s messages or see when they comment on things. That’s your customer service base. If they don’t have good customer service or a good feeling right away, if you don’t answer them or you don’t reply to them, they are going to go somewhere else. We have probably lost a lot of business because of this.”
Annala said she said she knows of many small businesses that are experiencing the same thing, on both Facebook and Instagram.
Brennen Schmidt, a cybersecurity expert, said multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the most efficient protection methods someone can set up on their business account.
“There’s a lot of opportunities for us to start leaning into MFA and seeing if we can really start encouraging those services that we are using on a daily basis and not just rely on text message as a two-factor authentication,” said Schmidt.
This week, Annala started receiving messages from her customers.
“They said, ‘I think someone has compromised your email list because I’ve gotten a message from some developer saying he would like to do some website work for Bibs and Boots Fabric’, so, it’s almost like they were asking her as if she were me,” Annala explained.
“I could make another account, but I’ve worked for three years on this account and my business is an online fabric company, so we ship orders out online. The first point of contact with your customer when you have an online business is through Facebook or Instagram or some sort of social media connection. All of my customers had liked that page of my business.”
She said that if she asked her customers to transfer to a new page, she might lose half of her customer reach.
“There’s algorithms in play on Facebook where if you have so many likes or so many views then they will bump up your posts,” said Annala. “Everything is tied to how your reach is on Facebook.”
Global News reached out to Meta Facebook on Tuesday, explaining Annala’s situation.
Their response read, “Thanks for reaching out. Our team is looking into this. I’ll keep you posted on any updates.”
However, on Wednesday, only a day after the Global request, Meta Facebook confirmed that they were able to restore Annala’s access to her business page.
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