I first blamed once of my son’s unstable exes for changing my birthday and several of my posts several months ago. I had previously not posted my birthday but I noticed that my account was showing my son’s DOB randomly, so I of course, fixed that. At the same time, because I was already suspicious, I decided to look a little closer at my account. I saw some of my posts had changes made to them- pictures were deleted, wording changed, posts disappeared completely, tags removed. These were not pictures that should have been flagged for anything wrong, the posts were not hate posts (I think they were all about events my kids had participated in?), and the one person I tagged in one picture, is the mother of one of my kids’ best friends. She definitely didn’t report it, lol! So, I changed my password, removed the birthday, turned on 2-factor authentication, this time using Google Authentication, signed out of my account on all devices, and went on about life. Then I noticed when I tried to tag people (my mother, husband, kids) in family pictures or posts, it began sending them messages in messenger instead of just the normal tags. I thought that was odd. Yesterday I got the dreaded “YOUR ACCOUNT IS RESTRICTED. YOU’RE TEMPORARILY RESTRICTED FROM RESHARING UNTIL JULY 29 AT 3:00AM” message… there’s nothing anywhere that shows I have a reason to be restricted, no appeal option, just this random message. While scrolling through Reddit, I see suggestions to upload Facebook information for backup, so I do that, then I decide to go check my “Legacy person.” That has been changed, too!!! To a daughter of mine that I don’t even know uses Facebook regularly and we are not close at all. I would never put her as my legacy contact. If fact, I know it was a different person because I changed it when I changed my password and 2-factor authorization.
Even if I had been hacked, when I caught it and changed everything, Google Authentication is a pretty tight way to secure your account. This is crazy.