Once you have a Meta for Business account, you can apply for Brands Rights Protection, assuming you have a registered trademark. Our application was approved quickly.

This opens up a set of tools to search for impostors, infringers, etc., and a bulk report option. This is significantly quicker than using the public-facing trademark and copyright reporting forms. Within a couple of days, all imposter pages were removed across FB and Instagram.

They also have a paid service called Meta Verified for Business. This service promises even quicker action on impostors, but there is a waitlist right now, so we couldn't try it. The Brands Rights Protection ultimately fixed our issue, for now at least.

Scammers are creating Facebook and Instagram pages pretending to be our company ([name-redacted]). They “hire” translators through DMs, get real work done for free, then demand a fee before the translator can “get paid.” We never hire through social platforms, but victims assume these pages are legitimate.

We report every fake page through Meta’s copyright and trademark forms. It usually takes about a week for each one to be removed, and by then new pages have already appeared. It’s endless whack-a-mole. We're now seeing negative reviews and Reddit threads accusing us of running the scam, and the reputational damage is starting to stack up.

We don't use these platforms personally or for business, but I tried creating an account and official page so we could at least put up a notice stating we don't hire through DMs. As soon as I created the account it was banned for “violating community guidelines.” I had only entered my name, DOB, email, password, and verified my email. I went through their video verification appeal and it was instantly denied as a permanent ban.

The same thing happened on Reddit. The account was banned right away and the appeal has been ignored for over a week.

How is it possible that scammers can create endless fake pages while a legitimate 10-year-old business with 23K positive reviews can't even create an account, much less post a warning?

We've reached out to our trademark and copyright attorney to see if they can help, but I wanted to ask HN, has anyone dealt with this? How do we get Meta to take real action against these impersonation scams, and how do we get a legitimate business account or page set up when the platform bans us on registration?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46141001

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Best of luck to you as it looks like you've got a great start.

Having zero cost of goods sold makes it possible to undercut on prices and pay for all your acquisition and still make a buck. Doesn't seem scalable or sustainable, but it has been a real nuisance for us. Translators are contacting us for their payment...

Upwork has not been willing to help us at all. They pull the ads quickly so by the time support clicks the link, the ad is down. They act as if it didn't happen if the link doesn't still work. Crazy.

There is a lot of fraud out there. Anything you can imagine and then quite a bit you can't if you don't spend your time thinking about how to screw others.

This can be quite nice when working with clients across different platforms like Asana, Trello, and GitHub.

As for downsides, we are a young company and don’t have the full feature set built yet. We are working hard though and making great progress.

As a small team, we all have our areas of focus and ownership, but contribute to many aspects of the business to ensure product and marketing are fully synced. From designing, building, and testing, to documenting, hosting, and supporting, you will own the API as your primary responsibility.

This is a backend heavy fullstack engineering role, but you will have some secondary responsibilities such as technical support for the marketing team, internal tooling, and browser extensions where you'll need solid frontend experience.

Our API is built on a LEMP stack hosted with DigitalOcean. Our framework of choice is Laravel and we utilize many tools from that ecosystem, such as Forge for server management, Envoyer for zero downtime deployments, Cashier for managing subscriptions with Stripe, Passport for OAuth, Horizon for queue management, etc.

Our web client utilizes React, TypeScript, Next.js, etc. You'll need familiarity with standard testing and development tools and technologies such as Git, Yarn, Babel, PHPUnit, etc.

Many more details about the role, team, offer, and hiring process are available here: https://hourstack.com/careers. Email jobs@hourstack.com if you'd like to apply.

There are many prioritization and time management strategies out there, but we intro some of the popular ones [0] and we'll be expanding each of those into detailed posts over the coming weeks. The first one about using the Ivy Lee method to prioritize tasks [1].

[0] https://hourstack.com/blog/16-effective-prioritization-and-t...

[1] https://hourstack.com/blog/how-to-use-the-ivy-lee-method-to-...

It seems to be a subject that trips a lot of people up. It's really common to see people talk about their marginal tax rate as if it is their effective tax rate. "I pay 24% in taxes and make $175K/year" - Not really though, you paid 24% on ~$4K of income, but 10% on the first $19,750, 12% on the income from $19,751 to $80,250, etc. Your marginal tax rate is 24% as that's what you'll pay on the next dollar, but your effective tax rate on all income earned was actually 14% (or whatever it actually is, just a loose example).

In your case, the discount is so significant that I'd think you'd want to showcase that. Maybe a slider to adjust the number of users and show the dollar amount of the discount as well as the total percent saved, which will continually grow as you increase the bucket of users in that lowest bracket?

Or in that FAQ you could give an example of a 300 person workspace and show how the calculation pencils out. Having to do math to figure out the ballpark cost of the product isn't great though, so if the info is public (ie you don't have to contact sales) then you should probably make it super easy to get to.

Just some ideas. You never know, everyone else might get it right away and I could have just been slow on it. My brain definitely went to doing rough math and thinking about how weird the pricing is at different user counts though!

You run into some weird pricing this way. For example, 250 users on the pro plan is $1,000/mo while 251 is $220.88.

If I mindlessly type youtube.com in and hit a error I immediately realize I did that mindlessly and get back to work. I've been doing this for a while and it has worked every time.

My original point was that acquisition entrepreneurship could be an option for someone with a broad skillset like the OP. How I funded the first one doesn't really impact that as everyone will have a different path and I simply took the one that was available to me at the time.

If an existing path can't be found then it will have to be made. That could mean working and saving for a while, starting a side project with the goal of it becoming a profitable business, partnering with a friend and earning equity through sweat, etc.

I did the first three solo and on the last one I had a couple of conversations with my attorney during the process. I wanted the attorney to be fully involved on the last one because the purchase price was higher than the previous acquisitions (high six figures), but the timing just didn't work out. I wanted to close quicker than he could handle so I just went ahead.

Asset purchases aren't that complicated since you aren't brining on liabilities. Still, I'm sure it is advisable to have professionals help with due diligence, contract negotiation, etc.