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Ctrl+f'd "terms"...unpleasantly surprised that no one else in the thread seems to have got this result :)

There's a hilarious map projection on the lobby TV in the 8th image. Massive unified red Korean peninsula (practically the size of Australia on the map), tiny sliver for the Japanese islands, and places Korea at the absolute center with all the other continents warped around it. Brilliant.

I was surprised too since OP's writeup indicates that he has 2FA on everything. You would think that you'd at least get an email or push notification if you get removed from an ad account/notification settings get changed, so it seems like an oversight by FB.

As someone who's fairly involved with the e-commerce/digital marketing space, let me just say I'm amazed by how brazenly nasty this scam is.

The TikTok promotional program is actually a real thing that does give around that amount of ad credit, and they have been promoting it very aggressively on Facebook with for a long while now, so it makes sense that OP would've not had any mental red flags triggered by the designs and creatives used by the scammers. The real killer is that PayPal is actually well within their rights to process this transaction (as part of the billing agreement generated when you link PayPal to Facebook Ads Manager: there actually was real ad spend in a real Facebook ad auction), so it's down to Facebook itself to refund the ad spend. (As an aside, I'm actually impressed that OP managed to reach Facebook support at all, and that they acknowledged or even understood what the problem was. I have had worse experiences in the past with FB...). What's really amazing to me is that the scammers managed to get on Google Play with thousands of obviously fake reviews, and get through Facebook ad review at all.

The scammer silently removing OP as an admin from their own ad account, preventing them from noticing or stopping the fraudulent ad campaign is just icing.

I suppose the real lesson to be learned is to simply avoid installing native applications when you can help it. OP didn't screenshot the login screen in app, so I can only assume it was a real Facebook oauth flow, but honestly at that point it's already too late. If anything OP should be grateful that the native app running on what was presumably his personal device didn't do anything worse.

It's actually even nastier than that. If you fail their automated checks for fake accounts, they'll lock your account and require you to submit a photo of your face and ID card.

He had a Facebook ads account with PayPal linked, and the hacker used his login info to run their own (apparently Vietnamese aluminum product) ad campaign and spend using his account.

Fascinating! I'll update my nomenclature, that's some quality digging.

Ha. I'm stealing that joke, that's quality. I wonder if anybody's managed financial success on Medium/Substack yet with a "hustler inspiration" focused GPT masquerading as a guru. I'd love to read that postmortem.

You have a good point about making the desktop experience more painless and idiot-proof.

The real problem for me though is that snaps are slow as hell. I mean like taking 4-5+ seconds to open on a box with an SSD, i7, and 64GB of RAM. That's unacceptable.

The icing on the cake for me is that even through the command line as you mention apt now seems to be giving me snaps instead of debs for a great deal of programs, which affects much more than the store experience. And, also, regarding said store experience: if stuff like Spotify takes 5+ seconds to open I doubt a user coming from Windows giving Linux a try is going to want to stick around long...it would be great if there was just a better solution.