We manage millions of dollars in annual Meta ad spend. Not thousands. Millions. Our retail clients grow their businesses through Meta Ads, and for a lot of them, it’s their single most important growth channel. We are, by any reasonable definition, a high-value customer.
And yet, for the past several months, Meta has been treating us like we don’t exist.
Here’s what’s been happening, because it’s genuinely one of the more absurd things we’ve experienced running an agency in two decades.
The loop goes like this. We hire a senior Paid Ads Specialist. They set up a dedicated work account, which, by the way, is standard professional practice. Keeping work and personal accounts separate is basic data hygiene, not a red flag. We upload their government ID for mandatory identity verification. Then, somewhere between five minutes and ten hours later, the account gets instantly banned.
We have done this with multiple specialists and social media managers now. Every single one banned. Before they’ve even opened an ad account or posted a single piece of content.
We have done this with multiple specialists and social media managers now. Every single one banned. Before they’ve even opened an ad account or posted a single piece of content.
Now, we get it. Reading this, you might be thinking there’s something suspicious going on. Maybe a pattern in the logins. Maybe something in the account setup that looks off. Maybe we’re leaving something out. It’s a fair reaction, Meta’s security systems exist for a reason, and when someone says “we keep getting banned,” the natural assumption is that they’re doing something to deserve it.
But here’s the thing. We have been advertising on Facebook since the platform first opened its doors to advertisers, back in 2008. We were there at the beginning. We have spent millions of dollars on it over that time. Our agency history, our billing history, our business identity – it’s all there. There is no shady pattern. There is no hidden behaviour. There is just a broken automated system that cannot distinguish between a bot farm and a professional who created a work account on their first day.
And when we try to fix it? That’s where it gets truly circular. Meta’s standard response is to file an appeal through the Account Quality dashboard. Sounds reasonable, until you realise that the appeal tool is inside the platform – the same platform the specialist is completely locked out of. You cannot appeal a login ban from behind a login screen.
We’ve tried everything. Every forum thread, every concierge support contact, every support line we could find. The answers we get back are remarkably consistent: “just create a new account” or “file an appeal.” So we create a new account. That one gets banned too – often faster than the first. There is no clean slate. There is just the same broken automated system flagging the same professional as a threat, over and over again.
The business impact of this is real and it compounds fast. Clients lose the specialists and managers they hired. Staff, who have done nothing wrong, end up with a black mark attached to their identity documents across multiple banned accounts. And we’re left trying to run campaigns and manage brand pages on a platform that could, at any moment, eliminate a key team member for no legitimate reason.
We never have had this problem with Google or even TikTok.
What we as the enabler of this platform want a simple fix. A manual onboarding pathway for verified agencies that doesn’t collapse the moment an automated system makes a bad call. A human-accessible support channel for login failures, someone who can actually look at an account and click override. And an honest acknowledgement from Meta that their automated identity verification is producing false positives at scale for professional users.
If you’re an agency owner who has hit the same wall, please share this. We’re not the only ones, and the only way this gets fixed is if someone at Meta with actual authority decides it’s worth looking at.
If you work at Meta and are reading this, please email us at hello (at) our domain name.