Toronto restaurateur speaks out after hackers hijack business accounts

The owner of a family-run restaurant in Toronto is fighting to keep the business alive after hackers took hold of his social media accounts.

The morning of July 7 started off like any other for Julian Morana, the owner of Toronto’s longstanding Bar Volo and its spinoffs Bottega Vol0, Birreria Volo, and Keep6 Imports. Little did he know, it would spiral into a weeks-long headache that would put his businesses and livelihood at risk.

“I have a newborn baby, so I was up quite early, and I had noticed Facebook advertisement charges on our business Amex,” Morana tells Dished Toronto, “and I don’t remember the last time I had posted a sponsored ad, so I thought that was peculiar.”

Upon further investigation, Morana discovered not only that there were multiple charges for Facebook advertising on the card, but that the daily spending limit had been increased and was only rising.

His first instinct was to flag the activity to Amex, but when he tried to log onto the business’s Instagram accounts, all of which were linked to his personal account, he learned that the issue went even deeper.

Upon logging in — or trying to — he received a notice that all of his accounts had been suspended because one account, in Instagram’s words, “doesn’t follow the rules.” Here’s the kicker: the account that got Morana suspended was none of his own. It was an unrelated user who had been added to Bar Volo’s business account, ostensibly by the hacker, that got them all, including Morana’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts, full of memories from the past nearly two decades, suspended.

Naturally, his first instinct was to pursue tech support from Meta to both appeal the suspension and regain control of his accounts. It was only when he found himself in a hair-pulling cycle of being redirected to various FAQ and information pages, finally resorting to Reddit for help, that he learned he wasn’t the only one in this situation.

Indeed, he was met with thousands of other business owners around the world who had similar experiences with hackers racking up charges on their Facebook ad centre and getting them booted off Instagram. It’s unclear how the hackers would benefit by doing this, but it’s very much happening.

Quickly, Morana gathered that the only way to access live support for his Facebook and Instagram accounts was to subscribe to Meta Verified, earning himself a blue checkmark, which runs between US$11.99 and US$349.99 a month. So be it. He picked the cheapest option, leveraged the one non-connected shell account he had for Birerria Volo and got it verified.

If only it were that easy.

Julien tells Dished Toronto that he went on to create several tickets with live support, all of them ending with the agent he was chatting with either referring him back to the same FAQ pages that had proven unhelpful in the first place or with the tickets being prematurely closed without the issue actually being resolved.

On the occasion that he did, finally, secure a phone call with a real, live tech support agent — at midnight in the middle of the week, no less — he finally made real progress towards getting to the root of the issue, Morana says. That is, until the agent he was working with allegedly abruptly informed him that Morana’s issue went beyond the scope of what they could fix, and that when the agent tried to escalate it further, the request was blocked.

In short, Morana is still without access to his social media accounts (save for the Birreria Volo account, which he’s now using to raise attention to his struggles) and is essentially out of luck, which, he tells Dished Toronto, has already made a significant impact on his various businesses.

“I had four events last week,” Morana says. “We had a wine producer from Sicily coming to Toronto, we had a wine dinner at Fauna in Ottawa on the Sunday. And on top of that, I had an event with two breweries, Willibald and Superflux, at one of our locations, so come Monday morning, I could not promote them. And I felt really bad because some of these were ticketed events, and I felt bad for the partners that we were collaborating with, because I wasn’t able to promote them.”

At the time that the account got hacked, Bar Volo had just reached 20,000 followers through organic growth, which, should he be unable to get access to his accounts before Instagram’s 180-day suspension appeal period is up, could be gone forever. Morana tells Dished Toronto that, after this experience, he’s not sure he’d have it in him to start from scratch.

“My first course of action is to get the accounts back. But I’ve also read that these types of cases can literally take months. There are some people that have been locked out for a year. So, I mean, it just depends on how much I really want to fight for it,” Morana tells Dished Toronto. Even if he were to start new accounts from scratch, he adds, the account handles are lost.

“The fact that now I have to, like, do what? ‘Bar Volo-dot-Toronto?’ like, that sucks,” he says.

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Still, Morana admits, social media is a major tool for businesses today, both to gain visibility and to communicate with customers. To lose it would be to lose a major lifeline, even if other avenues like newsletters, which he’s considering, are available. It’s not the end of the world, though, and it won’t be the end of Volo, Morana assures, but it sure is a headache.

“I mean, if we were able to survive the pandemic, I’m sure we’ll just survive without Instagram.”

In the meantime, Morana tells Dished Toronto that he’s contacted a lawyer to explore his options, which, he theorizes, might prompt a more comprehensive response from Meta. To this day, he tells Dished Toronto, he still has yet to get an explanation on what exactly happened to his accounts, how the hacker managed to make it through security measures like two-factor authentication, and why all efforts to retrieve his accounts have thus far proven fruitless.

“I never thought in a million years that I’m going to be filing a claim against Meta because they suspended all my business accounts,” Morana says.

“I mean, we have 50 employees. We rely on Instagram and Facebook not only to promote our day-to-day operations and our events, but our whole culture at Volo heavily depends on people having access to the information that we share, whether it’s a new product coming in or, a special. I mean, we’re a restaurant group of 40 years. We have a big following. It’s just, it’s pretty sad, it’s disappointing. We spent years building followers and reach, and followers have value in today’s business world, and that value has been taken away from us.”

Bar Volo

Address: 17 St Nicholas St.

Phone: 416-928-0018

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