How to Protect Your Meta Account, Ad Money and Music Files: 5 Lessons I Learned the Hard Way

This is probably one of the most important things I've ever written for you.

Most of what I write is about helping you gain something. Today I want to help you protect something instead, because losing what you've already built hurts more than most people expect.

There's research behind this. Studies on loss aversion show that losing something feels about twice as painful as the joy of gaining the same thing. So protecting what you have matters more than you'd think.

I've lost a few times over the past years, and I'm going to share five things you can do so you don't lose the way I did.

And please don't tell yourself it'll never happen to you. It happens more often than you think, and being fine so far doesn't mean you're safe.

1. I lost access to my Meta account

A while back I woke up to an email saying my account was restricted and that I could appeal. I have friends who never got their account back, and others who only got it back after paying thousands of dollars.

My whole business runs on my Meta account. The ads I run for my playlists, the ads for my clients, my Instagram, all of it.

So I panicked. I got lucky and got back in. But it can happen to anyone, sometimes for no reason and with no clear way to fix it.

The fix: get your account verified.

Here's the part most people get wrong about verification. The blue check doesn't matter much. What matters is that a verified account gets direct access to Meta support, so if something happens you have a way to reach a human and fix it.

If you're just starting out, I wouldn't stress about this. The more you have to lose, the more I'd protect your account.

2. Money got stolen from my ad account

Losing access to something digital is painful. Having money stolen from you is worse.

Someone added themselves to my Meta Business account and started running ads for their own product from my account, at $5,000 a day.

I could have lost $5,000 a day. I lost far less, and the only reason is that I had a daily spending limit set.

The fix: put a daily spending limit on your ad account.

If you never expect to spend more than $200 a day, set your limit at $200. If you're not sure what you'll spend, my free Meta Ads Budget Planner helps you work it out before you set the limit.

And one more tip that applies to everything: don't keep a lot of money on the card you use online. If it gets stolen or hacked, at least your savings aren't sitting there.

3. My phone got stolen on a date

This is the one that still stings the most. A few years ago I was on a first date, at the beach, at night. Things went further, let's leave it there.

A bit later she reached into her bag for her phone and it was gone. I checked my bag, and my phone was gone too.

Losing the phone and the date was bad. The worse part was that I'd never backed anything up. It never crossed my mind that I could lose it all.

Almost every photo and video I had was gone, from the first phone I got at 13 to the one stolen at 23. Ten years of memories disappeared that night.

The fix: keep your eyes on your phone, and back everything up.

Always keep your phone in sight. If it's not right next to you, play some music on it or leave the flashlight on so you can spot it.

And back up, back up, back up. I was careless enough to think I'd never lose all my photos. Now I pay a little every month for Dropbox so every photo and video I take backs up automatically.

Even if you're broke, pay the few dollars a month to get things backed up, and your laptop especially. Your music projects could be gone tomorrow, so keep them in a folder that backs up on its own, like Dropbox.

4. I used the same password for everything

Here's another thing that got stolen from me because I was young and careless. I used the exact same password for every website I signed up for. It's faster, and it's easy to remember, right?

That was a big mistake, a huge one.

These days websites get hacked all the time, and when they do, user data ends up leaked to the dark web. My username and password got leaked in one of those, and pretty quickly people started trying to get into my accounts.

Most of them couldn't, because I had two-factor turned on or changed the password in time. But a few got in. Someone got into my Discord and sent spam messages with viruses to every server I was part of.

The fix: use a password manager and turn on two-factor everywhere.

I use Norton's password manager now, and it creates a different password for every account. Yes, it takes more time, and it's a bit annoying to look up my password a few times a day. But my chances of getting hacked are close to zero now.

Turn on two-factor authentication on every site you've joined. The big ones to start with are Meta and Google.

One more thing: don't save your credit card anywhere, even on a site you use all the time. Type it in manually every time.

These things are annoying, and they'll save you a huge headache later.

5. I got logged out of WhatsApp

This last one is probably the smallest of them all. It's also the reason I decided to write this, because it happened to me only a few days before.

I got logged out of WhatsApp. My account is tied to a number that doesn't exist anymore, so I was sure I'd lost access for good, along with my conversations with friends, groups and clients.

Luckily I got back in through email. But all my conversations were deleted, along with stickers I'd been collecting for more than five years.

The fix: keep your number up to date, and save your contacts.

You're probably fine here. This one is for the people who get a little too careless, like me. Make sure the number on your WhatsApp is current, and if you've got a new number, update it today.

Save all your contacts to your phone and to the cloud or Google. If you lose them, you can't even move them over when you change numbers.

Three quick tips so you don't get hacked

• Don't open any link that says something like "your account may be suspended." A lot of those are scams built to grab your Meta login and break into your account.
• If you get a code on your phone and someone asks you to share it with them, don't. Ever.
• There's no free money. If something looks too easy or too good to be true, someone is probably trying to take something from you.

If even one of these saves you from what I went through, it was worth writing.