We reached out to Facebook and let them know what happened. We had put out the immediate fire, but we still had some serious repercussions to deal with: Someone hacked into their account, and that’s how they got access to our Ads Manager.)Įzra immediately booted that person’s access, and we had control once again. (Turns out it was one of our team members who had recently been given access to the account in order to fix a tracking issue. Soon we were able to learn, by checking the activity history in one of the ad sets, whose account it was that kept re-enabling the campaigns: So there ensued a “click war” between John pausing the accounts, and the person who hacked into our account turning them back on. But 3 minutes later, the campaigns were enabled again.
#Facebook hacking for money how to
Our quick-thinking CMO, John Grimshaw, immediately paused the campaigns while we tried to figure out how to stop this. But because they set the daily budget so high, Facebook’s reaction was to start spending money FAST. Now, thanks to spending limits there’s no way they were going to be able to spend roughly $2.8 million/day.
Because all of a sudden these campaigns (about 20 of them) each had a budget of $143,300/day. We didn’t have time to stop and make fun, though. (They all directed people to an affiliate weight-loss offer.) Not only was the copy spammy, but the targeting was incredibly broad-it just targeted women-and the ads felt super skeezy. You might think that anyone smart enough to hack into Facebook accounts would have at least some idea how to create a semi-decent campaign…right? But after just a few moments of browsing, we realized something was wrong.Īnd we’ve gotta say: they were t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e. Shortly after that, we logged back in and saw a bunch of NEW campaigns.Īt first, we thought maybe Facebook had switched our account with Carrie Underwood’s (whose picture was in the ads). Facebook has its fair share of tech problems, after all, so we waited and hoped our ads would reappear soon. We usually have ~10 campaigns running, so this was definitely not right. Things were going well for a month or so, until we woke up one day and realized there were NO ADS in our account. Either way, we rolled with the punches and started a brand-new account. It wasn’t our fault, but that’s another story. Here’s How It Happened (AKA, A Dramatic Day in the Smart Marketer Office)Īs you may or may not know, our Facebook ad account got shut down this past April. We’ll share our top 7 tips to protect your Facebook ad account soon.īut first, it might be insightful to read about how our account got hacked, how we found out about it, and what we did to regain control. Luckily, there are a lot of fairly easy things you can do to increase your security right now, today. We didn’t actually have to pay for the $4,000+ the hacker racked up in ad spend…but the opportunity cost of having our ads & campaigns deleted and having to start over from scratch is more in the $40,000-$50,000 range. “Security” isn’t a sexy marketing topic-especially compared to things like landing pages, sales videos, ad hooks, and so on.īut security is still a vital part of any business.īecause, as we had to learn the hard way, the consequences of a single security slip can be costly. Instead, we just want to get your attention and make sure you understand why this is important. We’re not saying this to be alarmist or for the shock value. Three weeks ago, someone hacked into our Facebook ad account.
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