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burnteyesterday at 10:42 PM3 repliesview on HN

> There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.

I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.

I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.

Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.

I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.

Companies still do this today.


Replies

j16sdiztoday at 1:20 AM

That is because Facebook have already gone out of scale and no reasonable human can handle those appeals anymore.

If you mix in the spammer and bad actors, it makes sense to just say no.

The solution is, of course, have smaller social networks.

show 1 reply
alex1138today at 12:20 AM

Some part of me deep inside that remembers Paypal in the early 2000s and their Kafka labryrinth systems thinks about Peter Thiel and how he's responsible for both Facebook and Paypal. Maybe coincidence, maybe not

isubkhankulovtoday at 12:46 AM

Companies created these traps not to screw customers but to thwart fraudsters. There are SO many worldwide - see annual fraud loss stats.

Paypal and many other companies that trade in valuables have to put up protections because there are almost no reprecussions for perpetrators in certain foreign countries.