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EPISODE 54

Surviving the Domino Effects of a Facebook Hack with Marcy Bernethy

Facebook Hack

Have you ever wondered how Facebook hacks happen and how you can reclaim your Facebook account if it gets hacked? Today’s guest is sharing her first-hand experience to help us prevent and prepare for this unfortunate possibility. 

One of my best TPT friends, Marcy Bernethy, joins me to talk about how she survived a five-month process of recovering her Facebook after being hacked. Marcy experienced one of the worst hacks her hacking team has ever handled. 

In today’s episode, Marcy shares her story about how her Facebook account was hacked, the journey to gain access back to her account over five months, and her best advice to prevent hacks from happening in our TPT businesses.

01:57 Marcy shares her experience with a Facebook hack

16:43 The five-month journey to recover her Facebook account

26:20 – Who social media insurance is for, and how it protects business owners

35:46 – The valuable support Marcy hired to help her get back into her Facebook

Our Guest on This Episode:

Marcy Bernethy (pronounced Bur-knee-the) is the founder and creator of Saddle Up for 2nd Grade and the Managing Math Stations professional development course. She’s a nationally recognized educational speaker and has been a top rated TPT seller for 11 years and counting. Marcy has helped thousands of teachers fall in love with teaching math again with her guided math resources and online trainings. When she’s not creating curriculum, recording a YouTube video, or working with teachers, you can find her hanging out in the backyard with her family, curled up on the couch with a good book, or riding her Peloton.

Kristen
Hey, hey teacher sellers. Welcome back to another episode of The Savvy Teacher Seller. I’m your host, Kristen Doyle. And in today’s episode, we are diving into the world of social media hacking. Specifically, we are talking about what happens when your Facebook account gets hacked.

Kristen
So if you’ve ever wondered how this happened, and how on earth you might be able to reclaim your Facebook account in the event that it gets hacked, how to protect yourselves from a hack, then you are going to love this episode.

Kristen
I am joined today by one of my best TPT friends at Marcy Bernethy. Marcy is the owner of saddle up for second grade and the creator of the managing mass stations professional development course. And she recently experienced having her Facebook account hacked. I didn’t realize it until we recorded this episode. But Marcy was actually told by a company that she partnered with to be able to get her account back that her hack was one of the worst that they have ever dealt with.

Kristen
So she is here to share her story about how her account was hacked some of the things that she experienced as a result of that hat that you might not be thinking about and how she was able to finally get her account back. So let’s jump right into this interview and get the conversation started about what happens when your Facebook account gets hacked.

Kristen
Hey, TPT sellers ready to seek growth in your business, you’re in the right place. Welcome to the savvy teacher seller. I’m Kristen Doyle. And I’m here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that will really make an impact on your sale. Let’s get started y’all.

Kristen
Hey, Marcy, thank you so much for being here.

Marcy
Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Kristen
I was so excited when you reached out and said you wanted to share your story about how your Facebook account got hacked, and kind of the steps that you took to get it back. And some things that we should all be doing to protect our accounts. Because I know that this is happening, it seems like more and more to TPT sellers. So it’s just so important to get this information out. I’m really glad that you wanted to come on and talk about it today.

Marcy
Yeah, I’m excited. I’m not excited about the topic. And I’m not excited that I experienced this. But I think that because we are seeing this happen so much more in the TPT community that it’s information that needs to be shared. And so I’m happy to be here.

Kristen
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is just so important for everybody to kind of understand what happens when your account gets hacked, what some of the repercussions are, because you’re still having some repercussions now, even though you’ve gotten your account back.

Kristen
So I think it’s just so important for people to be aware and to know kind of how you handled it to give them an idea of where to start in the event that they do experience a hack and also kind of some ways to try and prevent it too. So let’s just start with how you found out that you had been hacked in the first place. Because I remember getting a pretty panicked text message the day that you found out your account had been hacked.

Marcy
Yes. So it has been not quite a year. It’s been 10 months since I was hacked. And I was actually hacked the day before the back to school sale last August, the first back to school sale. So it happened in early August, the day before the back to school sale. And I woke up one morning and I reached for my phone. And I opened up Facebook and it said that I was logged out. And you know, sometimes apps on your phone, they just kind of randomly will log you out. And I really didn’t think anything about it at the time. I tried to log in a couple of times that it didn’t work. But sometimes apps can just be like that.

Marcy
So I didn’t think too much about it. I took my kids to school, I came back home, I did a couple of things. And I didn’t sit down at my computer until probably mid morning. And I tried to log into Facebook on my computer. And it still I couldn’t get logged in. So I called my husband and I said can you get on Facebook and see if I had been hacked. I had just kind of this weird feeling. And so he tried to search for my account or he went to type in my name and my personal account was completely gone. And that’s when the panic set in, that’s when I immediately texted you. And I said, Kristen, I have I have a big problem.

Kristen
Big problem at maybe the worst possible time, right before back to school sale, when I know you were trying to run ads.

Marcy
Yes. And so what happened was my personal Facebook account was hacked. And when this happened, and I’m going to be honest, I’m not 100% sure how this particular part happened. But they went into my account, and they were able to actually change my two factor authorization settings that I had set up on Facebook. Particularly, they change the phone number on my account, so that I would try to go in and I would try to change my password. And I couldn’t just go in and change my password, I would get an email that would say, go in and change your password, which I would do. But after you change your password, it would prompt you to enter a two factor code. And I could never do that. Because I would never get a two factor code sent to my email and I would never get a two factor code sent to my phone.

Kristen
Because they changed your phone number somehow. And so that code I guess, is going to their phone.

Marcy
Yes to their phone, or two somewhere out there in the meta universe somewhere. Because I thought, Okay, I’ll just go in, and I’ll just change my password, it’ll be fine. Little did I know that that was the least of my worries. So as the day went on, I had went in and I had notified, I have a social media manager. And I also have a Facebook Ads Manager. And they went in, and they were able to check my business account. And what we learned that my personal account was hacked in order to gain access to my business account, and my facebook ads account.

Marcy
So those are actually two separate things. And we noticed that within kind of an eight hour time period, from the time I went to bed the night before, until the time we discovered that it was hacked. These hackers had hacked my business account, and they had started running ads for extremely inappropriate content for my business page that promotes educational resources to elementary teachers. So that was when we realized, okay, we have a much bigger problem on our hands.

Kristen
Yeah, absolutely. Because now they have access to your ads account, which means they are spending your money running highly inappropriate ads, we won’t go into the content. Not only is this costing you money, it’s also possibly damaging your reputation. Because teachers are seeing these, and it’s not things they would associate you with normally.

Marcy
Yes. And so the first few days after it happened, we were able to go in and delete the posts that were being made. But it was like, as soon as we deleted a post, like a new one would pop back up immediately. And when I say we, I was not able to do anything because I didn’t have a personal Facebook account. I could not log into my business account or my ad account. So everything that was being done, was being taken care of via either my social media manager or my Facebook Ads Manager. But a few days after the hack happened, the hackers removed my social media manager and my business manager from the account. So even after like that happened, there was no way for us to stop these posts from happening.

Kristen
Yeah, so once that happens, you have no access to your accounts at all right?

Marcy
Yes, where it kind of gets complicated and I’ll try to explain this the best I can without going into a lot of the really personal details. So we were able to go in and report these posts as fraudulent and as spam. But here’s the thing, because I am the owner of the account, there was only so much that my social media manager and my Facebook ads manager could do as far as reporting, a lot of the things needed to come directly from me because I am the owner of the account.

Marcy
But I couldn’t log into Facebook. So there was so much that I couldn’t do. As I mentioned, we weren’t able to report the posts. And eventually, after about a week, Facebook, I guess, decided to finally listen to us. And they basically froze my entire ad account. Now, what this meant was that the hackers, they were still attempting to post ads daily, but they couldn’t post anything new. But for about a week, they were spending a very large amount of money daily, on to my financial account that I had hooked up to my Facebook ads.

Marcy
Another issue we had was, obviously, once we learned that they had access to my ad account, that I needed to contact my bank, and I needed to contact my credit card company because they were connected to that account. So they were notified, all of the charges were stopped. So they never actually cleared my account. But it was kind of like they were frozen, I couldn’t fully dispute the charges because in order to do that, you have to log into Facebook, and officially dispute them from Facebook. I could not do that. Because I could not log in to Facebook.

Kristen
And that’s such a huge issue. And it seems like Facebook would have a solution for this in place. Because that’s what I hear from everyone who gets hacked is that you can’t fix anything, because Facebook will only talk to you through Facebook. And if you are hacked, you don’t have Facebook anymore. I really think that they would, I don’t know, ads are their bread and butter. So you would think that they would have a better way to communicate.

Marcy
Exactly. And so Facebook support. And I’m going to say this in the nicest way possible, they were zero help. Because there’s not just a direct phone number that you can call and speak with a representative. It’s not like that, you have to go to the Facebook support website, or really the meta Support Center, which they have the information there and the steps that you can take. But in order to do the steps that it says to take, you have to be able to log into Facebook, and I couldn’t do that because my personal account was just gone.

Marcy
So I was never able to chat with an actual representative. And after about a three week period, I decided to go a different route because we were having zero luck with anything by this point, I still didn’t have access. My Facebook manager, my social media manager, they didn’t have access. And so I knew that I needed to try and take a different route. And I had actually reached out to a another TPT seller that I knew had had this experience and had kind of just finished up working with a third party company called hacked.com. And something that’s funny, if I was to go to Facebook, and I learned this because I shared my story on Facebook. And whenever you type in hacked.com into Facebook, Facebook will block that post. So I can’t even like type it out.

Kristen
We will put the link in the show notes. Where Facebook is not in charge.

Marcy
So I worked with a third party company hacked.com. And they were wonderful. But it was a very long process. So the first thing that we had to do was in order for them to be able to help me my account had to be disabled. And what that meant was I had to go 30 days without trying to log into Facebook at all that means not trying to change my password. Nothing. So my account had to basically become dormant in order for them to take action.

Marcy
Then it took after that initial 30 day period, it took another month for us to actually get a phone call with a Facebook representative. And I am here to tell you that that was a joke, because they didn’t care that my account was hacked at all. They care more about trying to talk about a marketing plan to get me to spend more money on Facebook ads, rather than helping me get my account back the call that we got. It was pointless.

Kristen
I remember it sounded like you were just having one of those calls that they send out every now and then if you’re running ads, I don’t know how many people listening run ads on a regular basis. But I get emails from Facebook that say, Hey, hop on a call with our marketing professional to help you make more money on your ads. And I’ve never done one. But I have heard from people who have that they’re just trying to sell you on spending more money.

Marcy
Exactly, yes. And so any type of contacts that we tried to do with Facebook, let’s say via email, we would get a automated response back. And they would say, you know, like to reply with such and such information so that they could look into your account? Well, when you would try to reply, every single reply address we got back from Facebook was a no reply address.

Kristen
Can’t reply to that.

Marcy
It was pointless. So here are some of the steps that we took in this first one. When we first tried it. I was like, there is no way this is going to work. But I went and bought an Oculus, you know those like virtual reality like headsets?

Kristen
Yeah.

Marcy
Here’s why I did this. With the representative from hacking.com that I was working with, he was like, you just have to trust me. So Oculus is owned by Meta, which is now Facebook, Instagram, and all the things. And so when you set up your Oculus account, you are assigned a Facebook representative. And you have to log in via your Facebook account. And so they had a lot of successful attempts with this in the past, where you go and you purchase an Oculus, you register it, and then you go into the Oculus support. Which is basically the same because you have to be able to access your Facebook account. And they can help you get your account back.

Marcy
And that’s actually my friend that I mentioned earlier that I had reached out to this is actually how she got her account back was through buying an Oculus. That did not work for me. And I ended up returning it and we ended up going a different route. But the initial hack happened in August, from October to December, which December is when I got my account back.

Marcy
So the next step that we decided to take was we filed multiple complaints with the Attorney General of California. The reason why we did California because that is where the Facebook headquarters are obviously located. We filed complaints with the Attorney General of Oklahoma, because that is the state that I currently live in. And we also filed complaints with the Attorney General of the State of Texas because that is where my LLC is registered.

Marcy
So over this course of three months from when I started that process, from October into December, I filed four different complaints with the Attorney General of California. I worked with a representative from the Attorney General’s office with the state of Oklahoma. I worked with them multiple times had multiple phone conversations, lots of email communication back and forth. And then they would relay messages like back and forth between myself and Facebook. And I also have the guidance with my representative of hacked.com as well helping me with this, you know, making sure that you know we’re doing things correctly making sure that I’m communicating properly. Then we also filed multiple complaints with the Better Business Bureau.

Kristen
I bet you never imagined in the course of your business that you would be contacting the Attorney General and In the Better Business Bureau over Facebook of all things,

Marcy
No. And I kind of feel like me and the attorney general of Oklahoma, we’re on like a first name basis. And what I learned through this process, not just with working from hacked.com, but with speaking from representatives from the Attorney General’s Office is that this is a very common thing. And it is a common thing that realistically, most small businesses, when their Facebook account gets hacked, they don’t know the proper steps in order to take. And so most small businesses, what do they do they just create a new account and start over?

Kristen
Yeah, and I’ve seen a lot of people who think that’s what they have to do. And that I mean, if your accounts been around a long time, and you’ve built up, you know, you have a lot of followers, you have a Facebook pixel you, that’s a lot of data and a lot of starting over.

Marcy
Yes, so I’ve had my facebook page for 10 years. So what we were able to do is we were actually able to just create a new ad account, and then thank goodness, we were able to save my Facebook pixel, were able to import my Pixel into the new ad account. But it’s still, it wasn’t the same.

Marcy
So while all of this is taking place, while I were just working on trying to get my Facebook account back here is a part that not many people talk about. And this is a part where I feel like I need to really share in case this was to ever happen to you. So not only was my account hacked, but because they hacked my facebook ads account, I had financial information linked to that account. I had a business credit card, a business bank account and then I also had a PayPal debit card that I like, haven’t used in a very long time. But it was just on there kind of like as a backup payment. And when this happened, the hackers were able to go in and hack all of my financial information, they gained access to my business credit card, my business bank account, and my PayPal account. And I’m not just talking about, like they have my debit card number, like they had actual account information.

Kristen
And that’s the part that’s so scary is that it could affect all of your financials then.

Marcy
And it did. Luckily, we notified all of my financial institutions, like I said, Nothing ever officially was charged, no money actually wasn’t taken from my account. But it kind of stayed in like that draft, like pending mode. And because I couldn’t officially dispute them. Because when they were running ads, they were charging a very large amount of money to these accounts daily. My financial accounts basically became frozen. And so there was about a three day period where I mean, I had money to spend to run my business, I could not do anything.

Kristen
And on the bank side of things, the bank did the right thing, they froze your account so that these people would continue spending your money. So thank God for that. But then that puts you in such an awful place where you have money in your account and you can’t pay for things.

Marcy
It was I so I’ll tell you this, I was told by two of my financial institutions and the member of hacked.com that I work with, that this was one of the worst Facebook social media hacks they had ever seen.

Kristen
Wow. Lucky you.

Marcy
So glad they picked me to do that. Record breaking. When something like that happens, you know, luckily, like people that work for me, or you know, if I have kind of maybe like a small organization, you know that I work with that if I needed to pay them during that time period. They were very gracious and they were very supportive and I I would say, like 90% of the people or companies that I worked with, they were wonderful. They completely understood.

Kristen
Yeah, that’s so good to hear to that most people are understand. I remember you had to reach out to me, I think it was about your website care plan. But yes, it was going to the payment was going to be due and you your account was frozen. And obviously, I was fine. But yeah, I mean, what happens to the other 10%? You said, 90%? Were really helpful and understanding what about the other 10%? What’s that like?

Marcy
They didn’t care, they were not gracious. Thankfully, like, I think about big things in my business that I pay for, like my email service provider, and my project management system, things like that. Luckily, I don’t pay for monthly, like I had already paid for them annually. But there were a few smaller things that are I consider small, but they’re large corporations. And I don’t really want to name names, but you know, ones that that I use on a daily basis, that are very significant in order for me to run my business. And they were not very gracious. So I would have a late payment. And then luckily, once that everything was cleared up, I was able to fix it. But because there was such large amounts of money being spent on that account, I’ll say, I had to get completely a brand new business checking account, not just a new debit card.

Kristen
Yeah, we’re not talking order a replacement card.

Marcy
Yeah, I had to get a whole new accounts, I had to get a completely new business credit card. Everything was brand new. But I am into this 10 months. Now luckily, I mean, I have my I have my accounts back now. But I am 10 months in and I still have limitations on my financial accounts. Like let’s say if I need to pay for something that is a larger amount, I would say 95% of the time, it still gets flagged. And what I have to do is I have to call, I have my own personal representative with my bank, we’re on a first name basis to and I have to call them. And there is like a process that I have to go through in order for these payments to clear and these are things that I do like regularly, every month.

Marcy
These are not just things that like, like a one off purchase. And the reason why it’s like this is because my hack was so I guess in depth that even once we got things fixed, once you get hacked, and you create new accounts, or whatever, are you creating a Facebook account, or a new bank account, whatever it might be, your name, and your information still has to be put on those accounts. And so once you’re hacked, your risk of being hacked, again, is very significant. And so because of that I still have limitations on my financial accounts, and they said that, like it could take up to 24 months for these limitations to go away.

Kristen
And so frustrating.

Marcy
I mean, it’s very frustrating.

Kristen
I know we all get annoyed when the bank texts you and you have to say yes, that a charge can go through and things but this is like next level beyond that.

Marcy
I can’t just text Yes, I have to speak with an actual representative. I mean, we’re buddies now it’s fine.

Kristen
New friends. So obviously, we want to make sure we’re using really strong passwords on our Facebook accounts. We have two factor authentication on, we’re downloading those backup codes, all of those kinds of things. But one of the things that you have done to protect yourself in the future is social media insurance, which I literally did not know was a thing until you told me. So can you share just a little bit about that before we wrap up today?

Marcy
Yeah, so this is a thing. I had no idea it was a thing, but as a small business, and if your business uses social media to run your business, which I would say the majority of TPT sellers do. You can have social media insurance. And so what this means is basically if your accounts are hacked, whether it be Facebook, Instagram, am Twitter tiktok, you know, whatever platform it might be, then these insurance companies, they will actually pay you a stipend for every day that your account is hacked.

Marcy
Because when your account is hacked your small business is essentially you’re losing money daily. And so what this insurance company, what they will do is they reimburse you a fee every day that your accounts are hacked. Now, I wish that I had this in place before my account happened before my hack happened, because it took five and a half months for me to get my Facebook account back. It happened in August, and I got it back had like the end of December.

Kristen
And so that’s the entire back to school season, and the quarter four TPT sale. Yes. And I don’t know if your business is like mine, that back to school season is bread and butter for my TPT sales.

Marcy
When I say this was the most stressful thing that has ever happened to me. It definitely is because it wasn’t just a social media hack. It was almost kind of like my livelihood in a way. It was something that was really completely out of my control. And I couldn’t do anything about it. Now, thankfully, you know, I mentioned earlier, we just created a new ad account and attached my pixel to it. So we were able to run ads for some of that period of time. But it wasn’t the same, if that makes sense. And so while we did have that option, it was a very eye opening experience. Because you know, we always say, you know, what would happen to my business if social media went away?

Kristen
Yeah, you got a little taste of that. Right?

Marcy
I got a I got a big taste of that. And And luckily, I still had Instagram, we relied very heavily on email marketing, and things like that to help promote products. And I had a course launch during this particular time, too. And so we definitely had to think outside of the box when it came to marketing for sure.

Kristen
Yeah, absolutely. Just thinking about people who are listening today, we probably have people who do no social media at all, they probably turned this episode off, before it even got started. But we also have people who just kind of dabble in Facebook, they don’t run any ads, they have a really small page. And then we have people who really do a lot with their Facebook page and their Instagram account. But they don’t do ads yet. It’s all just organic. And then of course we have people like you and I who do both. We are running things on our pages. We’re running ads all the time. Obviously, people like us who are definitely spending money on Facebook and using our pages heavily. We probably need that social media insurance, definitely something to consider.

Kristen
What would you say about the person who just kind of dabbles in Facebook a little and then someone who uses it a lot but doesn’t run ads? Would you say they should look into social media insurance? Or at what point is that an appropriate thing to start thinking about?

Marcy
I would say that it is something that is needed, really no matter what stage you are in your business, because not only is this help protecting my ad account now, but this is just helping my general social media platforms. So like, let’s say, for example, if my Instagram got hacked, maybe they don’t have my ad account, but just they hacked my Instagram, I can still be reimbursed a daily amount for every day that my Instagram is hacked.

Kristen
So basically, if you rely on your social media at all, then it’s something to look into.

Marcy
I think that if you are using the income that you bring in from your TPT store, whether it be you are using it to fund personal things, maybe it’s just kind of you’re using it as a side hustle, you know, you use it to pay for things for your kids, or it’s your extra Amazon money for the month or whatever it might be. You can still be protected in some way. And it’s very inexpensive. I mean, I think it’s like I’m paying like $8 a month. It’s very inexpensive.

Kristen
Not bad at all. Okay, so where do people look for social media insurance?

Marcy
Yeah. So, again, I didn’t know this. There are lots of options out there. You can do just a quick Google search and you’re going to find so many helpful websites. What I ended up doing it is our local insurance company that we have, like our homeowners insurance through, and our car insurance through and things like that they actually have a branch of social media insurance. And so we just signed up through them because they’re local, you know, we trust them. And so that’s kind of the route that I ended up taking.

Marcy
So you could definitely reach out to your insurance companies to see, hey, is this something that you offer? Otherwise, you can do a quick Google search, and you are going to find tons of insurance companies, they only provide social media insurance, rather than, you know, all different types. So a quick Google search, and you’ll be able to find anything that you need and pick what’s best for you.

Kristen
Awesome. So one last question. I know, you said you worked with hacked.com, it took a long time, it was not an instant fix. And I know a lot of people think when they pay a company like that, because obviously their services are not free. When they pay a company like that, that they’ll get instant results. And you didn’t obviously it took a lot longer if you had this to do over again. Would you still use them?

Marcy
Yes. Because they knew things to try that I never would have thought trying to figure this out on my own, I would have never thought to contact the attorney general of three different states.

Kristen
And that’s really what worked, right. It’s talking to them.

Marcy
Yes. And it was submitting multiple complaints through them, is really what kind of got us there. But they were there to help really guide me through the process of you know, who to talk to, it’s just kind of having like that advice, you know, making sure that you’re doing things correctly. And so what I use them again, yes, absolutely. They had two different payment options. You could have them work to get just your personal account, or you could have them work to get your business account. And I was very lucky, because the main root of my problem was my personal account was hacked, because, you know, that’s what everything was tied to. And so we were very lucky that once we got my personal account back, we were able to gain access back to everything else.

Marcy
So was it an investment? Yes, but was it worth it? 100% one, just because it really helped with my stress level. And I felt very confident in the things that they were helping me do and the things that they were trying to do for me as well. So yes, 100% If you are looking your business is your main revenue stream, and you heavily rely on it, if it is your livelihood. 1,000%, I would recommend working with them.

Kristen
Good to know. And I’m sure you know, you ended up talking to Attorney General’s I’m sure there are legal terms and things that you didn’t understand that they helped with as well.

Marcy
Oh, I had no idea.

Kristen
I would be completely lost.

Marcy
Yes. And they were really good. You know about formatting, the complaints that we sent in making sure that the language was appropriate yet professional, and not the not so nice for is that I wanted to say.

Kristen
Exactly. Well, thank you so much for being willing to come on and just open up and share this whole story. I know that it will really help other people as they unfortunately experience hacks, because we know it, it does happen, it’s going to continue happening. So I’m sure it will help other sellers in the event that they do experience a hack and also just helps all of us kind of to think about some things we can do like social media insurance to protect ourselves in the event that something does happen.

Marcy
Yeah, exactly. Because you think oh, that will never happen to me. But it can and I learned a lot through the experience as far as how to handle crisis within my business because it wasn’t just a short one. I mean, it was five and a half months, and I’m still dealing with it a little bit to this day. But I had a lot of growth personally, within this process. And I just think that, especially now because so much of our business is technology based and it’s becoming more and more of a thing. And so anything that you can do to protect yourself is worth it.

Marcy
Like that the password that you might have that is your dog’s name. or whatever it might be. You don’t need to use that. Like I can tell you now my password is 38 characters long. I could not tell you what my facebook password is like I have it saved in multiple places so that I can access it you know when needed. But just really making sure change your passwords, making sure they’re long with lots of characters and numbers, things that it’s not easy to guess downloading your two factor codes directly from Facebook so that you don’t have to experience what I did.

Kristen
As inconvenient as all of those things are I know a lot of us are hesitant, we kind of push back against making all those changes to our passwords and using the two factor authentication because it is annoying to have to go grab your phone and open up the app and tap the thing or grab the code or whatever it is, especially for something like our facebook account that is so deeply tied to our business. It is just so important that we deal with the annoyance and keep our account as safe as we can.

Marcy
It’s a daily thing.

Kristen
And it’s even worse if you have people working for you because then they try to get in and you have to get the code before it turns out. Yeah, but it is so worth it in the end.

Marcy
But it is it’s worth it in the long run and will save you a lot of stress and headache in the future.

Kristen
That wraps up our conversation with Marci about her Facebook hack. A huge thank you, Marcy, for sharing your journey through all of this and being open and willing to just discuss this with everyone. Her experience along with so many others that I keep seeing pop up and TPT sellers Facebook groups are such a good reminder for all of us of how important it is to take care of our digital security, especially as often as sellers are seeming to experience Facebook hacks recently.

Kristen
So your action step for today is to take a few minutes to check up on all of your Facebook security settings. And we’ll put a link in the show notes for for the security center is in your account. Make sure you update those passwords, make them strong and secure, enable two factor authentication review your app permissions, all of those kinds of things to make sure your account is as safe as it can possibly be to protect you from a hack.

Kristen
If you have enjoyed this episode, if you have any TPT seller friends with Facebook accounts, share this episode with them. Make sure that you are helping to spread the word about these steps that we can take to prevent our accounts from being hacked and to try to protect what has ultimately become a pretty important business asset for all of us. I’ll talk to you soon.

Kristen
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, please share it with another teacher seller who would also find it helpful. For more resources on Growing Your TPT business. Head to Kristendoyle.co/TPT. Talk to you soon.

 

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About Your Host

Your host, Kristen Doyle, has a decade of experience selling on TpT and has made all the mistakes so that you don’t have to! As a web designer and the go-to SEO expert in the TpT world, she loves helping TpT sellers stand out in the crowd & grow their businesses with passive income strategies.

Tune in to hear Kristen cover all aspects of running a TpT business – from leveraging SEO, to improving product listings, to effective TpT seller strategies for your store and website.

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