[RegBarclay]

This happened to my daughter. I got a notification that she'd changed her profile picture and it was changed to text that looked Arabic to me. Between the time I said something to my wife about it and my wife pulling up Facebook on her phone, the account was locked and disappeared.

HERE'S THE SOLUTION:

Purchase an Oculus device. Do not open it. It's a Facebook product and requires a Facebook account to use it. Oculus tech support has humans and inside channels to resurrect Facebook accounts that have been left in limbo by the dumb Facebook automated support.

Once you get your account back, return the Oculus device for a refund.

You have to act fairly quickly because the suspended Facebook accounts are permanently deleted and become completely unrecoverable after around 30 days.

[edoceo]

This is most concrete example of "if it's stupid but works, it's not stupid"

[vmception]

its stupid you have to take the circuitous route at all, which is what people mean by saying its stupid

[Nextgrid]

As an extra layer of safety, buy the device on a credit card - in the UK you get Section 75 protection which is by law entitles you to a refund for defective/faulty/not as described products - similar to card networks' protections except it's the law and will succeed even in cases where a typical card dispute would fail.

[auspex]

So you’re saying if we really want out of the service get your account suspended instead of just never logging in again?

[jcmontx]

This is genius. It even feels kinda hacky.

[RegBarclay]

I'm no genius. Just good search engine skills. Geek dad jumped in an started looking for answers and found reports where others had done this.

[arbitrage]

Thanks, Dad!

[marto1]

That's MacGyver tier stuff right there! Did you by any chance have internal info on FB's support structure and which buttons to press or just a stroke of genius ?

[RegBarclay]

After the usual government ID requests were satisfied and the automated e-mails started saying "we're done here," I just googled it and found a few anecdotal cases where someone had gone the Oculus route. It worked for my daughter. She had a really tough time returning the Oculus. She's a slightly more than casual gamer, but she's also a poor grad student.