E467 | What To Do If Your Account Gets Hacked

What do you do if your Facebook account gets hacked? Unfortunately, we were recently hacked and I wanted to give our experience of how we navigated it and how you can do the same in the future. This was a stressful situation but there are steps you can do now to prevent this in the future. Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So I was having a conversation with one of our staff members about documentation and he had come over from a in-network practice that he was working at and he was talking about just how long it would take him to document and click through and the workflow and how, just how time consuming it was and how much easier it's been with the software that we use, which is PT everywhere.

And I know for us, we're very aware. Sort of time leaks within our staff and our own schedules. And it's just one of the worst things you can do is just waste time on things when you could be doing them more efficiently. One thing for us is we have to document. It's something we need to do and you need to do it as efficiently as you possibly can because that's where you're gonna save a lot of your time.

We were seeing our staff members save upwards of an hour a day as far as cleaning up his documentation, making it more efficient. What if you got an hour of your day back just from documentation? What if all of your staff did the same thing? Highly recommend you take a look at PT everywhere.

It's been a huge time saver for us and really has made a big difference in our efficiency of our practice. You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you're gonna really like what they have. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on, guys? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today we're talking about. What to do if your Facebook account gets hacked? So last week I was on a trip to do some business planning with my business partners, and Monday morning we get a message from our ads team that there is, so there's some weird ads that are set up in one of our accounts for PT Biz, and they want to.

What's going on? Come to find out that we had someone that had admin access to to our PTB account as well as our athlete's potential account. And that person's account was was hacked. What happened was this whoever hacked into the account, Basically disabled this person's account took over and started setting up ads everywhere they could, I'm assuming probably in any account that had a connection to this this person's account.

So I look at our account and there's there's ads are all kinds of weird stuff. There was an ad for an anti-gravity chair on our physical therapy. Practices page, which obviously doesn't really make sense in comparison to all the other things that we had ever advertised for. And the budget was $20,000 over seven days, and it was spending money fast.

In fact, I'll give it to this hacker. They were pretty good at Facebook ads because they had they had some decent conversions and purchases that had happened from the from the ad. But while I'm sitting there, In a completely different place trying to piece together what the hell is going on.

This has never happened before. We figured out what was going on and I wanna give you a after action review of what you can do, if this ever happens to you, what you can do to stop this from happening to you. And something that I feel like really helped me quite a bit in terms of dealing with what it really is a fairly stressful situation because.

We do use those accounts quite a bit and they will just get shut down once fraudulent activity happens for your own sake and to make sure that they're they're able to solve whatever's going on. First thing is, Number one, if you or anybody that you have that has administrative access or any sort of access to your account, whether it be just your business account, your personal account or your ads manager, make sure that they have good.

Password hygiene and two factor authentication set up. This is something that a lot of people don't want to do because it's an extra step and it's like an annoyance where you have to use a, either a text message or a validator application that basically has six numbers that change every 30 seconds.

But you want to have the set up, two factor authentication, secures your account significantly more. This is something that we made sure everybody on our team had two factor authentication set up. I did, my wife did, but it doesn't matter if you do the main account, like it's, it, it just depends on anybody that has access to your account has to have the set up as well because they can basically get into your account through any of these people.

And this is what happened with us because I was the main. And by the time that I got in to shut these ads off, they had already changed my they already changed my status from an admin to whatever the lowest level one was, and then had created multiple other users underneath our account that they were starting to set up ads for.

So make sure that you have good account and password hygiene, and that meaning you have a solid. And that you have two factor authentications. It's probably the best thing you can do to, ultimately avoid something like this happening in the first place. The second thing, let's say this does happen your best bet is to go to Messenger and you want to message Facebook business support.

So this is something that I did fairly quickly, and it's a live chat. And they got back to me fairly fast. It's, I'm assuming, some outsourced HR team who knows where that Facebook has. But we were able to message back and forth. They put they flagged our account.

Money continued to be spent. I think they end up spending close to a thousand. Before they shut the account down. But a after that, they were notified of it, the activity was deemed fraudulent. We weren't charged any of the money that was spent on the account and the account was reinstated the hackers, whoever were removed.

And then we were able to reset everything without losing any of our data. So it can, you can feel very helpless, I think, in these situations. And if it happens, make sure that you reach out. The Facebook business support chat that's probably your best bet of like actually reaching somebody versus trying to call somebody if this does happen.

And I would tell you like, it's more likely this is gonna happen now than ever. They're just like a lot more of this going on. That's why you wanna be more proactive on the front end. Make sure that you're changing your passwords. And once this happened, I was able to get this resolved.

It took about three days. For everything to get resolved. And I can tell you when I first. Got into my account and I could like actually see people switching up our administrative access. Like it's a really, it's a really bad feeling, it's it's a stressful thing to watch.

And, for me stoicism is something that I've focused on for years. I read a lot about it. I try to implement a lot of it. And what a good time to, to put this into play because I was stressed out and, what I did was. I did a postmortem. I said, all right. Worst, worst case scenario.

Worst case scenario would be they spend $20,000 of our. They don't reinstate our account. It gets shut down. And and then like I turn my credit card off as well. There's one option you can do, you can basically put a stop on your credit card so that no payment can go through. So for me, like worst case scenario I did was, all right, we're $20,000 down.

On this antigravity ad that this asshole set up on our page and and I get my account, deleted basically. Okay. Is that gonna put our physical therapy practice out of business? No, it wouldn't. It would hurt. It would suck. Quite a bit. That's a lot of money that would eat up a lot of profit, but it would still exist.

It would still be there. It's something that I'm pretty sure that I could talk to our bank about and get a charge back on that to Facebook because of fraudulent activities. And I went through this scenario, as I was sitting there trying to figure out what to do and honestly feeling pretty helpless because it's not like I can do anything about it.

And I'm actively watching our account just get manipulated by who knows who in, in real time. I think for me at least, I, this is a good test of emotion control in a situation where I had very little control over what was going on. It ruined my day for about an hour, and then I was able to reset myself and move on from there and get back to the things I needed to do for reasons why I was on this trip and en enjoy the time that I had with the people that I was with, so that we could really put ourself in the best position to move our business forward versus I think if this had happened to.

Five years ago, let's say it would've ruined my entire trip. I would've been freaking out over cybersecurity. I would've not been able to like, let it go. I would've just, it would've festered, it would've just bothered me. I would've obsessed over it. And it's something that, That honestly would've just ruined the time I had in person with actual people doing things that really mattered for our business in a very negative way.

I, there's two things I would tell you from this. Number one, tactically, what do you do if your account gets shut down? For sure. Put a stop on your card. Reach out to Facebook business support. And make sure you have, as best security as you can set up on your actual account and anybody that's connected to it, because it wasn't through us, it was through a connection.

And that's what caught us off guard more than anything was it wasn't even necessarily one of our employees or myself. So make sure anybody connected to you has the same thing in place and that you have, two factor authentications set up in particular. And then from there, if you get yourself, into a position where something negative is happening with your business, you can't really.

I think looking at these postmortems of, all right, what's worst case scenario and taking yourself through that, really, this doesn't have to apply to business, it can apply to anything, but I think it's a very helpful exercise that you can go through that really helps, you rationalize just how bad some of these things are.

Cause it's not like this was a life or death thing. It's not like one of my family members was hurt or sick or life-threatening issue going. It's not like anything of major significance was happening. Frankly, this was a first world white collar business owner problem, right? That that it's easy to freak out over.

But in the grand scheme of things, fairly irrelevant and being able to. Maintain emotional control during those situations. It just allows you to be present and enjoy all the other stuff around you. I hope that those two things help. It's an unfortunate thing, but hopefully you can learn from from what we went through.

And ideally it doesn't happen at all. So make sure you get your stuff squared away on the Facebook side. If you have a problem, reach out to their live chat, lock your card up if it happens. And if it does, think about worst case scenario. What's the postmortem? Is it really that?

And is there anything you can do about it? Because if not, don't let it ruin the rest of your time.

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Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one-way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about.

4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country. I do live trainings in there with Eve Gigi every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside that group.

So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.