<story><title>Facebook incorrectly reports personal blog to DigitalOcean for phishing</title><url>https://social.lol/@robb/111704215593992932</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>leiferik</author><text>It feels really crummy to be accused and convicted of an &amp;quot;offense&amp;quot; by an algorithm, especially without any recourse.&lt;p&gt;I once had my account with a major cloud provider terminated for &amp;quot;violating our terms of service&amp;quot;. After contacting support, they then claimed that someone had gained access to my credentials.&lt;p&gt;What evidence did they have? None. I just updated a VM&amp;#x27;s metadata too frequently (about once a minute). This tripped an ML model, which caused them to automatically terminate my account and send an automated email saying that I had been a bad boy.&lt;p&gt;This took down a key part of my business for about 5 hours (while I navigated my way through layers of customer support and ultimately temporarily moved this functionality to another cloud provider). Customers were not happy.&lt;p&gt;It took about 2 weeks and multiple support tickets for the full story to come out. I got them to refund a few months of charges (amounted to several hundred dollars at the time) and restore my account. There was never any recognition that they made a mistake.&lt;p&gt;I get that companies need to resort to automated means to handle fraud or abuse. But they should also own up to it, add some humility in their automated outreach to customers (&amp;quot;our automated system has detected possible X&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;you are guilty&amp;quot;), provide clear escalation paths to talk to a human, and provide a way to &amp;quot;shield&amp;quot; your account (identity verification, upfront deposit of $X, etc) that forces them to contact you &lt;i&gt;before&lt;/i&gt; any enforcement action.&lt;p&gt;In my case, I upgraded to a paid support plan ($100+ per month) in the hopes that their system will be a little less trigger happy with my account in the future. I don&amp;#x27;t use support at all, it&amp;#x27;s purely a lame form of insurance that may or may not actually protect against anything.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook incorrectly reports personal blog to DigitalOcean for phishing</title><url>https://social.lol/@robb/111704215593992932</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>NathanFlurry</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve experienced many similar incidents – I&amp;#x27;ve been running multiplayer game servers on these &amp;quot;discount&amp;quot; server providers for a while now. They receive umpteen requests per day about spamming, hosting pirating&amp;#x2F;other illegal content, botnets, etc with only an associated IP address.&lt;p&gt;Vultr has a nasty habit of forwarding these directly to the &lt;i&gt;current&lt;/i&gt; holder of the IP address with a dire warning that your account will be shut down within 24h if no action is taken, regardless of the timestamp of the complaint. Abusers just create &amp;amp; destroy servers frequently frequently to acquire fresh IP addresses to host malicious content on. It became a morning routine of copy+pasta responses to these emails to keep the servers online.</text></comment>