‘I cried for an entire day': Hacking that turned into a three month nightmare for a new business
A young woman has revealed how her business came 'crashing down' after her Meta accounts got hacked, which turned into a three-month nightmare.
Melissa Haddad, 30, works full-time as a lawyer but had always dreamt of launching her own cosmetics brand.
She wanted to create a make-up brand that put skincare first and she launched DEIA cosmetics in March 2025.
Ms Haddad told news.com.au that she's always loved how 'beauty can make people feel' and wanted to capture that feeling through her brand.
The 30-year-old's dream didn't happen overnight; it took five years to get the brand off the ground, and it wasn't cheap.
'I invested over $100,000 to get DEIA off the ground. The biggest investment was formula development and investing in stock given the big-quality ingredients we use,' she said.
'It took me five years from conceptualisation to launch DEIA alongside working full time as a corporate lawyer. There were no shortcuts from a financial perspective.'
The excitement of finally launching the brand was sadly short-lived, as a month later, the brand's social media accounts got hacked and Ms Haddad lost access.
After trying and failing to regain access to them through Meta's support services, the business owner decided to cut her losses and create new social media accounts for the brand.
It wasn't ideal, but the solution worked, until she tried to use Meta Ads to grow her business and immediately hit a wall.
Meta Ads is a marketing tool offered by Meta Platforms that allows businesses to create targeted advertising across the tech giant's platforms.
'I quickly realised that, even with new accounts, I can't run Meta ads due to legacy issues,' Ms Haddad said.
'The most important being that my brand's website is 'owned' by the hacked Meta accounts, which I no longer can access. So even if (I was) running Meta Ads, I can't redirect people anywhere, making running the ads pointless.'
Ms Haddad then spent weeks going back and forth with Meta trying to resolve the issue, but it was all very complicated.
For instance the hackers had changed her email address and, therefore, it was becoming increasingly hard to prove the accounts belonged to her in the first place.
The 30-year-old said at times it felt like she was 'banging' her head against a wall to find a solution.
'It was super exhausting,' she said.
The whole thing has been a massive headache and Ms Haddad said it was a big 'challenge' for her business.
The brand was new in an already competitive market and she couldn't even target consumers the way she wanted to.
'We had amazing momentum after launch for a few weeks but that came crashing down really quickly when I couldn't run Meta Ads,' she said.
'One of the biggest challenges for any new business is building brand awareness and being able to capture data and re-target consumers or potential customers who have seen the brand.
'It has been near impossible to measure things like how well we are re-targeting customers because that all lies in the Meta Ads infrastructure.'
News.com.au has reached out to Meta for comment.
Ms Haddad said the whole thing just felt like a giant 'shame' and it was awful that she couldn't just fix the issue and get her Meta accounts back.
It was also impossible to know just how many sales she lost because of it or how much it impacted the brand's growth.
'The biggest tangible loss is, of course, lost sales revenue, and because the hack happened a week after we launched, I really only have that week to go off in terms of the dollar amount of lost sales revenue,' she explained.
'Based on that week's sales prior to the hack - we would have lost potential sales revenue of around $25,000 a month, if not more as we haven't been able to scale.
'Obviously as a new brand without the ability to run Meta Ads, our brand awareness has grown slowly compared given our content is only reaching organic followers.'
The business owner stressed that losing a brand's social media accounts in 2025 is a really big deal.
'I felt like everything suddenly has flopped and we missed the opportunity to build momentum around launch when the novelty and excitement of a new brand is already there,' she said.
Finally, after three months, Ms Haddad regained access to her original hacked accounts, but she had to get creative.
'Ultimately, I felt like I was not even close to a resolution after going around in circles for three months with the various layers of Meta's support system,' she said.
'I ended up reaching out to my own personal network and was referred to someone within Meta's Australian division who could help me reset my credentials and obtain ownership of my hacked account.
'I couldn't believe my eyes when I finally saw my account. I think I cried for an entire day. The relief was indescribable.'
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