You may think your social media accounts are protected, but ABC11 viewers continue to reach out that their Facebook accounts have been hacked and they can't get access to the accounts.
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"I have thought about that just about every day since it happened and there's nothing that I can think of that really made me think that I had done anything to let my identity be exposed to someone," Morgan Billings said.
Billings says she doesn't remember clicking on any suspicious links, responding to messages from people they don't know, or adding a new friend on her account but out of the blue, it was hacked. She got a notice from Facebook that stated her account was "disabled because of explicit material that was posted."
"I had no clue what it was, and the reasoning that they gave me was that it was child sexual exploitation," she said.
Billings is a social worker in Sanford who works with children. She says she can't see what was posted on her page but is afraid it could hurt her standing in the community, but the hackers didn't stop there.
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"The next day I wake up to a notification from PayPal that I was charged $250 from Facebook," Billings said.
Billings was able to get the PayPal charge reversed however, she says Facebook still hasn't responded to multiple emails. She says she still doesn't have access to her Facebook page which means more than a decade of memories are gone.
"Conversations with people that have died that I'm never going to have access to again. There's pictures of my kids that are on Facebook that I'm never gonna have again," Billings adds
This is the same story for Kimberly McMillian of Clayton. She says her trouble started when the email and phone number attached to her account changed. The Wake County Sherriff's employee says she constantly changes her password, but even still, hackers got access. She set up a new account, but a couple of weeks later the hackers were inside that profile as well and threatening her family members.
"They contacted my sister. My sister was telling them, you know, why are you doing this too, you know, why are you hacking? And they told her I can hack yours. I'll give her back her page and I'll hack yours so, you know, it, that doesn't make sense to me why they're doing it, but they're out there." McMillian said.
McMillian says she also reached out to Facebook and reported the hack.
"I have tried to get in touch with Facebook and it seems like they don't understand what I'm asking of them. They'll tell me the same thing about their standards, but the standard is I've been hacked and you're not helping me," McMillian said.
The Troubleshooter Takeaways are to always have two-factor authentication, that way if someone tries to log on, you can stop it. You can also use an authenticator app for extra protection. Another tip, avoid adding your bank information to your Facebook account as if it gets hacked, the scammer now could have access to it.