My accounts are banned: what next?

Most companies running multiple accounts sooner or later come face to face with the reality of sudden account bans from platforms like Facebook, Google or Amazon. In this week’s blog, we explore what your next steps are after your account has been suspended.

When your account gets banned

There is normally no advance warning when an account is banned; you will simply receive an email telling you that your profile has been banned or suspended, or occasionally will only know upon attempting login.

Even if a reason is not given, you can generally find a list of the top-level reasons for account bans. For instance, if your Facebook Business Manager is restricted from advertising, it could be due to perceived repeated ad violations, to attempting to circumvent the ad review process (such as by blocking access to your landing page) or for ‘inauthentic behavior’.

Can you appeal when your account gets banned?

Yes, you can appeal – but success rates are low.

In the case of Facebook, all you can do is to request a review through the Account Quality function, but you have little option to provide supporting information.

In the case of Amazon, there are multiple levels. If your Amazon seller account is suspended, then you need to get in touch with Amazon to find out the reasons and then propose a POA or Plan of Action that is persuasive enough to demonstrate that the issues won’t happen again.

If, as is most common when multi-accounting is detected, the account has been deactivated, then you have to file an appeal within 90 days, again including a POA and supporting documents.

If your Google Ads account is suspended, you can submit a detailed appeal and will then need to await a response by email.

The same goes for eBay; you’ll need to respond through the message link with further information about your account.

However, as much as these take effort, they very rarely show any results. From the perspective of these platforms, they’re attempting to protect their brand, and would prefer to err on the side of caution – only reinstating if it’s utterly watertight that a mistake has been made.

What are the next steps after an appeal?

For many people, the instinct is to immediately create another account so that business can continue.

Unfortunately, however, this usually results in a swift ban yet again. So, the question that arises is “how did they recognize that it was me again?”

To put it simply, this comes down to your browser fingerprint: that sum of different factors that websites can assemble to build up a profile of you and uniquely track you.

What follows therefore is that you need to be able to manage that identity that is being built, and to show it as different to the one with which your banned accounts are associated.

How do virtual browser profiles work?

The way to manage these identities then is through virtual browser profiles – and this is where Multilogin comes in. Each profile appears as a native, consistent fingerprint to third parties, without leaking between each one; add to that a strong residential proxy and you have a stable solution to run multiple accounts as if they’re from separate devices, helping to prevent account bans.