Becoming Lily Collins

How did a well-informed tech reporter end up getting his Facebook account hacked? PETER GRIFFIN offers advice for the unwary.

- PETER GRIFFIN

It was a sunny morning in early March when Lily Collins entered my life. After waking up, I reached for my smartphone and scrolled through the Stuff and NZ Herald websites. Then I tapped on the Facebook app to see what friends around the world had been up to overnight.

But I wasn't able to log in and, alarmingly, I wasn't Peter Griffin on Facebook any more, I was Lily Collins. The British-American actress is the star of Netflix show Emily in Paris. But I'd never heard of her and, more importantly, why was she now in charge of my 15-year-old Facebook account?

The answer to that question sent me, along with thousands of people around the world, into an endless loop of automated forms and digital dead-ends that revealed a cold reality about the world's largest social network. Despite having more than 60,000 staff, there's often no one to talk to when you need technical help the most.

Those of us caught up in the particularly pernicious Lily Collins hack found our accounts hijacked, our passwords changed. In a bid to limit the damage, which could include posting extremist content to our newsfeeds, making unauthorised purchases using credit cards tied to our accounts and messaging our friends with links to malware, Facebook's automated systems disabled our accounts.

That sounds temporary, reversible. But, to my horror, I found the decision was actually final and no appeal could be lodged, no identification documents presented to prove who I was. There was no email address to write to customer service, no chatbot to spit out annoyingly obtuse answers, no recourse whatsoever.

Internet forums are full of Lily Collins victims. To be clear, the actress has no involvement in the hacking, but obviously left an impression on whoever was behind the keyboard masterminding the attack.

FLAGGED AS MALWARE