Recovering a hacked Facebook account

[TheCowboy]

Hey all,

My wife's Facebook account has been hacked. She got an email notification yesterday saying that someone in Chicago had changed her password and if it wasn't her click a link to secure her account. Obviously, that could be someone using a VPN. Clicking on the link leads to a ''This link has expired'' message from Facebook so perhaps the hacker got there before us and assured Facebook it was all OK. When I checked her email trash can there were several Facebook emails in there about the password change that she hadn't deleted herself.

The BIG problem here is that the account was linked to this old email address that she hasn't used in years AND an old phone number from when she lived in a different country over 10 years ago so recovery via phone definitely isn't an option and the hacker has changed the email address so that's another option that is closed off.

Facebook has now disabled the account so it's worthless to the hacker and no friends have received messages asking for money or anything like that so at least that's something. It's just a shame that all the posts and a lot of photos will now be lost forever if the account can't be recovered.

It's not a huge inconvenience as she can create a new account which I will set up all of the proper security and recovery methods on just like my own but as I said it's just annoying to lose about 13 years worth of stuff there.

Finally, I exhausted every option on Google and Facebook that I could with no success. Even submitting an appeal through her account required a 6 digit code that they would send to her phone or the hackers email, both of which I mentioned we don't have access to.

I personally think it's dead in the water but maybe someone here has an idea on how to get it back.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.