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I can’t get facebook to understand my report and help me?
I don’t know what the hell I am supposed to do. It’s like I’ve reached a brick wall. It’s almost like the replies I am getting are from a bot or something.
So, the situation is this. I have created a brand/business with a name that cannot be found elsewhere on the internet. It is a totally fictional name and totally original. Let’s just say for arguments sake it is “CakeyWakey” (that’s not actually the real name).
I have registered my social media EVERYWHERE with this word and secured myself the exact URL across every site.
Youtube/@cakeywakey
TikTok/@cakeywakey
Twitter/cakeywakey
Instagram/cakeywakey. etc, etc.
(It’s very important to me to have the exact name everywhere, rather than adding random numbers and letters to it, which is why I was careful to use a name that did not exist anywhere else. I am going to be posting a lot of stuff on each site to promote my brand).
However, I stupidly talked about my business/brand creation process online as I was doing it, and someone sneakily grabbed the name CakeyWakey on facebook before I had the chance to register it. It was a dumb mistake on my part. I contacted facebook’s intellectual property email address and explained the situation, that someone took that name with the intention of impersonating me and my brand (or just to spite me).
I was talking to them from my personal email address, and we went back and forth for a while. I don’t know what it is, but I am speaking perfect english, explaining everything in very simple and basic terms, however, they always reply with a question that I already easily explained to them. It doesn’t make sense. It really is like talking to a robot.
Anyhow, after going back and forth for a while, they said it’s not clear that I actually am the rights owner or are otherwise authorized to submit this report, so they said I should send them another email, but this time to do it from an email address associated with the brand. So I did. It was from cakeywakey@hotmail. This hotmail address is what I used to create all my social media.
And just for added further proof (even though they never asked me to), I added this same email address to the “about” section of my youtube page and gave them a link, so they can see that this email address is real and that it is directly connected to the social media.
After waiting three weeks for a reply from them, I finally got a response at my cakeyway@hotmail address, which said: “it’s not clear that you are the rights owner or are otherwise authorized to submit this report”.
I just jumped through their hoops for them, doing exactly what they asked (and more), and they still just gave me the same message they previously gave me.
What the hell else am I supposed to do, or what can I do to prove to them that I am the rightful owner of the brand name?
They could easily click on the link to my about section on youtube to see that I using the same email address to communicate with them that is visible on the social media for the brand.
It’s so simple and yet they don’t seem to get it.
I don’t know what to do.
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1 Reply
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Send the email from your domain. cakeywakey.com or whatever.
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What have they done wrong aside from take an available account?
In the past i’ve known of brands having to purchase said accounts in order to get the handle. I believe it’s after a certain period of time that if it’s unused you can try to claim it.
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Unfortunately nothing has happened here that Meta will help you with. Impersonation of a business doesn’t even exist on Meta which means your only options are trademark and copyright infringement and it seems that neither of these apply right now. So you are basically stuffed, take the name “cakeywakey_official” instead and move on.
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They want to see copyrights. Need to trademark your brand or you don’t have any rights to a name. If it was a personal name, they would ask to see a ID.
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At this time there is nothing you can do to recover that handle unless it goes unused by the original registrant for quite some time (it’s changed a bit, but at least a few months with zero action on it).
I don’t think the person you were working with at Meta fully understood your issue or it would have been a very short “sorry, there’s nothing we can do here”. Even if you had CakeyWakey with trademarks, copyright, etc. they still wouldn’t release the handle to you. The only way they would take action is if you had a business account that was posting about your business, products, etc. and this other account was fully impersonating your account with the same products, ads, etc. but those links lead to a scam or fraudulent site.
If it helps, the Facebook algorithm heavily favors groups over business pages, so you can always make the Facebook page “OfficialCakeyWakey” and have an attached group that is “CakeyWakey” since the group will get the most organic traffic anyways.
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