I have been replaced on Facebook. Cancelled. Subsumed.

It took a week for the bad guys to knock me down and keep me down. I fought tooth-and-nail.  I emailed “support@fb” repeatedly and got no support, or even an acknowledgement. I tried various “recover your account” methods, and found two strange profiles linked to my account, but was stymied when I tried to go further with the unhelpful bots. I wrote passionate snail-mail letters to people in high places at Meta here in Canada, and ultimately to people in law enforcement and to Meta headquarters at …. wait for it… One Hacker Way in Menlo Park, CA. But in the end the criminals won. They became “me”.  On Facebook, though it still looks like “me”, below, I am now really a guy with a Nigerian country code on his Apple iPhone who changed my password and other details on my account, then proceeded to hit up tons of my friends with messages about various scams involving rebates and grants and other ways of making easy money that no reasonably sane person would fall for. Or would they?

In a careless moment, on Sunday May 7^th at around 4:40 pm, I fell for one of those cons. I saw on my news feed that a Toronto friend was seeking help because she thought she’d been hacked. Someone suggested in the comments on her post that she change her Friend settings to be private, but she said she didn’t know how.  I commented with a screen grab showing her where the settings were and almost immediately a message popped up on Messenger from “her” saying it didn’t work that way on “her” phone and could I help her with a recovery code that Facebook would email  me. I was dubious and thought about it for a moment, but what harm could it do to give her a code? The email did come from Facebook and in the Subject line on my Inbox, it gave the code, so I dutifully messaged “her” the number.

What I didn’t realize was that I was not talking to my friend on Messenger, and it likely wasn’t even her page anymore.  But now look at what was in the body of Facebook’s email “below the fold” as they say in the newspaper business, once I opened it up fully.  The email was asking me if I wanted to change MY OWN password. It wasn’t for the benefit of any friend – it was the key to unlock my account, and I gave it away without realizing it.   I consider myself fairly skeptical and tech-savvy, but I didn’t see any of that coming.  Needless to say, (and I’ve worked with site developers online in the past) the code should NOT have been in the subject line. It should have been nested within the body so the recipient has a chance to see what is about to happen. As one friend said, we lose our rational brain when someone needs our help. Lesson learned.

Several minutes later, I got another email from Facebook asking if I’d changed my phone number to the Jackson, Mississippi one with the Nigerian country code that they showed me. Needless to say, I said it wasn’t.  At that point, I had to email them proof of i.d. so I sent a copy of my passport.  Three minutes later, they emailed again saying my password had been changed by that phone number.  Hackers know they have to act very fast. Now the Catch-22 was in motion: i.e. you have to know your current password to change to a new one, and since I didn’t know what the criminals had used, I was stuck.  I could no longer open my page on my phone or iPad but by some strange quirk, I was still able to open it on my desktop on Chrome, because I’d never logged out. So I could still post photos on my desktop and did so a few times, hoping they had been kicked off. But soon I got emails from friends about spam on Messenger and I was able to look at that via my desktop. There were loads of messages to friends… I don’t know how many but I’m guessing it was in the several dozens or up to a hundred…. showing that “I” was sending out spam messages and even audio calls about ELF rebates, grants, and other nonsense.  These have gone out in two waves, including today, when a friend in the Bronx emailed me a screen grab of the very same con-game I fell for last week. Only mine featured better grammar. Before I was locked out, I went into Messenger and apologized to all the people who’d received messages and who hadn’t yet blocked me or deleted the conversations; I told them to ignore the request, as it hadn’t come from me. My lovely friends were understanding, but eventually I lost the ability to reassure them since what was happening was not reassuring at all.

******

I joined Facebook in January 2010, part of the growing movement to social media. In professional seminars I attended as a freelance writer/photographer in the early 2000s, consultants urged us to “Get on Social Media!! Gather followers! Ask them questions to generate feedback!”   I was never very good at that, had never taken part in chat rooms, but when I finally complied and signed up on Facebook I realized how much fun it was to have this growing community of like-minded folks.  Facebook became my ‘water cooler’, my ‘recess’ (with breaks taken too many times each day!)  Part of why I enjoyed it so much was that I’ve always loved “words with pictures”; it dictated the course of my career. So I especially loved making my cover and profile photos, which I eventually posted in my personal photo library on the cloud.

Of the 2800+ friends I gathered from around the gardening world on Facebook, I managed to meet several “IRL” (in real life) over the years.  On a 2014 trip to California, I met one of the leading native plant proponents based in Sonoma and we shared a lovely dinner with our spouses.  Planning a 2018 trip to Oregon, I put out a bulletin on my page that I was going to be in Seattle and Portland and would love to see my virtual friends for a picnic at the University of Washington (that’s me in the middle with David, Mary, Rebecca and Sue)…..

…… and a few days later at a favourite Portland nursery.  It was such fun to see fellow gardeners Ann, Vanessa, Kate and Patricia in the flesh! It made my life and career much richer.

In 2019, a happy set of Facebook-related events resulted in a shared small plane charter to the wild rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island with Mary Anne and Caitlin for a two-day stay in Cougar Annie’s Garden.

A few months later, I was meeting my dear Facebook friend Liberto in Athens “IRL” for the first time, as he hosted a botanical tour of Greece. That trip resulted in a very comprehensive blog about Greek flora — and music!

Liberto was the smartest part of my Facebook puzzle years 2013-15, when I designed tough anagram picture puzzles that tested my friends’ plant identification skills and anagram-solving talent. The solution to the one below is ‘California Dreaming’ (on such a winter’s day, get it?)  I wrote a blog about those fun puzzles.

Because I photograph plants for my stock library, I also became an administrator of a Facebook site called Plant Idents with more than 7.7K members.  As of this week, since I’m locked out of my Facebook account by criminals, the other admins are working without my help.

For seven months in 2011-12, I wrote a daily poem to accompany a photo I took on a one-mile walk and posted them on Facebook – I called them Walking Time Rhymes.  This was from November 25, 2011 in Vancouver. My mom would die less than 3 months later, so this particular rainy walk and rhyme was precious to me. 

And through Facebook, I met a group of very special friends and like-minded garden communicators who organize yearly tours called the Garden Bloggers’ Fling.  This lovely garden was in Denver in 2018, below. This September, we’ll meet in Philadelphia.  Our wonderful tour host Karl lost his own Facebook page to hackers, along with thousands of curated photos from his garden travels throughout the world.  We will have much to talk about together.  

Though I’m gone from Facebook for the moment, I’m pushing hard to get my page back. But like Hansel and Gretel, I’ve left some crumbs in the FB forest in the form of three sets of unique hashtags I made over the years. My friends who have enjoyed my pollinator posts….

…fairy crowns…..

…. and my blogs featuring music and related gardening concepts will likely know what they are.  The hashtag for social media was invented by a smart young man named Chris Messina, an open-source advocate who was kind enough to drop me a note saying he’d lost his own page once to hackers so he knew how stressful it can be. If you live by social media, you can die by it as well. I’m hoping I’m only seriously wounded, but not fatally. Fingers crossed.  

POSTSCRIPT: I set up a new Facebook page on July 13th. If you get a friend request from a woman who looks like this, it’s really “me”.