Reporting scam and fraud pages

Reporting pages can be difficult, because you need to carefully pick the right violation category, and even when you do so correctly, Facebook will often erroneously reject your report while telling you that the "content does not violate any community guidelines" – if that happens, simply request a second review, as that will sometimes result in the content being taken down when, in fact, correctly reported.

Unfortunately, due to the sheer number of things I have reported, I know from experience that Facebook's content moderation process is super poor. They could somehow have encouraged users that accurately report things, but instead they choose to punish us for using the report feature too quickly. I was recently blocked from using the report feature myself; when this happens you may get a message when reporting something, like this:

You’re Temporarily Blocked

It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been temporarily blocked from using it.

If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let us know.

A very easy way to get pages shut down almost instantly, is by reporting them as "pretending to be Meta or Facebook" – but only do this if they are actually doing it. E.g. They are using Facebook or Meta logos. It seems there is some sort of automated system to identify this when you report it, and the pages will be taken down instantly.

Reporting pages and profiles as being "fake" rarely seem to work, even when the profile is obviously fake. I have one specific profile that's even been revealed in the Danish media as fake, and Facebook has flat out rejected my genuine reports about it. They do not seem to care, and occasionally misleading content on the profile still seem to get attention.

An exception to this rule has been the profiles by the name Multichecks BussinesSevice; many of them (for some reason not all) will be instantly deleted when you report them as fake. Unfortunately, I got erroneously blocked by Facebook for reporting these, so I cannot continue. Please, do carry on reporting them, because they are being used to send scam messages to people's Facebook pages, claiming they are violating the standards, and even pretending to be Facebook which is itself a violation of the standards.

The review process is super bad

Unfortunately, I have reported many obvious scams on Facebook, and even hacked users and pages, and often nothing was done about it – not even when it was totally obvious simply by judging the context of the reported content. Sometimes I would report the pages themselves, other times I would try to report individual posts on the pages.

A horrible fact I discovered is, when you report individual posts, typically Facebook will only take down the offending post itself, and not the page. This is a huge risk and security flaw in Facebook. Obviously, when a scam post is accurately judged to be a scam and taken down, it should trigger an automatic review of the account or page that posted it.

I have even reported an account that was mentioned in Danish media for being fake. I reported it repeatedly. Each time Facebook erroneously rejected my report. It seems there is very little success in reporting fake personal accounts, even when it is proven and the owner has admitted that the account is fake in the media. What I would like to see is somehow to attach optional proof to our reports, because that would hopefully make it easier for Facebook to judge the content.

There also seem to be no way to help out elderly friends who has gotten hacked – simply linking to https://facebook.com/hacked is not sufficient to help someone. Hacked personal accounts should be given back to the original owners when certain patterns emerge. E.g. It is very easy for Facebook to tell if a Personal account has been hacked; if the original owner was based in Denmark, and the current owner is suddenly based in India, clearly something dubious is going on. Also, if the Name of the account is suddenly changed to something weird and radically different. Especially easy to tell if the old owner, including connected friends, are trying to get the account back. E.g. If the account is reported by connected or previously connected friends (because sometimes the hacker will block or remove friends). This whole process is extremely poorly made and should be improved ASAP.

In fact, I think Facebook should end all other development projects until they improve their internal security processes and manage to give users a decent tool to help recover stolen accounts.

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