There’s nothing worse than waking up to an email notification telling you that your account has been permanently suspended. Giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay run constant checks, often banning thousands of accounts in waves. If you’d rather not fall victim to one of those huge ban waves, you need to know what triggers them, how to escape them, and what you can do once the ban hammer has fallen.
Why do accounts get banned?
This is a difficult question to answer as there are so many factors that can contribute to a ban. Besides, every platform has its own community guidelines and regulations, making things even more complicated. That said, permanent suspensions, as opposed to temporary suspensions, often point toward suspicious activity that’s long-standing and ongoing.
Most platforms send warnings before issuing bans, but it’s easy for those warnings to slip through, especially if you receive hundreds of messages/emails every day.
Your behavior is inconsistent
Do you often access your accounts through many different IPs? It’s not uncommon for marketers to quickly move from one geolocation to another as they check different versions of ads and websites, forgetting to turn their VPN off when accessing their own personal accounts.
Imagine logging on to your Instagram account from London at 16:30, Shanghai at 17:00, and New York at 18:00. Even if there’s nothing fishy going on (e.g., you’ve just been switching your VPN on and off), Facebook/Meta is likely to sound the alarm for your Instagram profile. This can also happen if you’re sharing social media accounts with colleagues at work and they’re accessing the same profile from a country that’s thousands of miles away. Other behavior like mass following / unfollowing lots of other profiles in a short time can also trigger warnings.
Your account history is unknown
Buying or renting warmed-up accounts is a big no-no. Just because a profile is real and has existed for a while, it doesn’t mean it won’t cause you trouble in the future. How exactly can an account be flagged as suspicious? Let’s look at some examples:
- Geolocation: If your eBay account was created in the US, but you suddenly start using it in the UK, your activity would likely raise eyebrows.
- IP address: A consistent, residential IP that matches the country you selected when creating your account is ideal. VPNs and proxies are great for maintaining anonymity, but you should never resort to free options, in which case you might be sharing your IP with spammers, scammers, bots, and other crooks.
- History and cookies: If you buy an old Facebook business account just to launch an ad campaign in a specific country, you can’t ever be sure of the profile’s history. What if that account has already been flagged as suspicious by Facebook, and the irregular patterns detected after your purchase actually trigger a temporary ban? It’s risky business.
Even if the account isn’t already flagged, irregular history patterns and cookie preferences are enough to make it look suspicious.
You’ve disabled browser fingerprinting
If you want to run multiple accounts, disabling fingerprinting makes total sense. Unfortunately, running multiple accounts under the same identity is forbidden on most platforms, and disabling fingerprinting on your devices can give your intentions away. Many sites don’t load at all without the information your browser fingerprint gives away, and disabling it can be a red flag because most users don’t do this.
You log in to multiple accounts on the same browser
This is perhaps the quickest way to get your accounts banned. Everything from your cookies, browser profile, and hardware settings to your public IP, location, and system settings provide enough evidence to flag your accounts as suspicious. If you’re not meant to have more than one profile, this is the best way to tell a platform that you are indeed breaking the rules.
What to do if you get banned
You can try to appeal, but that rarely works. A permanent ban is, well, permanent. Worst of all, once you’ve received a ban, you’ll have a tough time contacting customer support—and they might never tell you exactly why your account was banned in the first place. In fact, sometimes you might not realize for a while that it’s happened, because you’re ‘shadowbanned’ - limited to restricted functionality without being informed about it.
Preventing the ban
Since there’s no way back, you should do everything in your power to prevent the ban from ever happening. There are quite a few things you can do to reduce the chances of getting banned on popular platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, and eBay:
- Don’t create multiple accounts: Obviously, this isn’t always a choice, so if you want to run multiple accounts, you need to do it right—more on that below.
- Don’t buy your account/profile: If you can’t adhere to the first rule, at least make sure that all the new profiles you create are your own.
- Build a history with different sites naturally: For example, if you want to run Google ads on a new account, take some time to browse the internet with your new profile—don’t jump into Google Ads right away.
- Protect your account: Yes, you can get banned even if you’ve done nothing wrong. If hackers steal your data and use your profile for nefarious purposes, you risk losing access to your account. Change your password often, activate two-factor authentication, and update your privacy settings to make sure your data is safe.
But did you know there’s a way to enjoy the best of both worlds? You can manage multiple accounts safely while also keeping your anonymity by using a stealth browsing platform like Kameleo.
Use multiple accounts securely - The Kameleo Way
If you want to run multiple accounts without attracting unwanted attention, a common VPN service won’t cut it. You might manage to mask your IP, but your identity will still be very much exposed through browser fingerprinting.
Kameleo allows you to create, save, and load multiple profiles, assigning unique browser fingerprints to each one of them. With the click of a button, you can switch between different accounts, and your browser won’t be able to tell that it’s the same person or device. Your behavior won’t be flagged as inconsistent, and you won't have to worry about getting banned ever again.
Kameleo supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, featuring unlimited browser profiles. It’s also available for Android devices. The platform also comes with a cookie editor tool, canvas spoofing, easy geolocation switching, audio fingerprint spoofing, and more features to help you stay anonymous in the world of big data.