Hackers Spent $3k Of My Money Promoting Elderly Women's Bras, And Here's What I Learned | Cyber Security Basics

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 280

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show or watching us on YouTube, first of all, welcome. So glad to have you. This podcast is for you. If you are a freelancer, you offer creative services, and you want to earn more money from your creative skills without selling your soul, this podcast is for you. And actually, this episode is a weird place to start compared to what we normally talk about, because today we're going to talk about how to not lose money instead of how to make money. And I'm going to explain all this in a second. For my returning listeners, so glad to have you back. Thanks for giving the show a chance again and again, every week for whatever reason. I'm glad to have you back. Today is Halloween, happy Halloween for all my Halloween lovers that are out there.

This is always a fun holiday to decorate for and prepare for and enjoy with everybody.

As of the day this episode airs tomorrow, I'll be heading out to Peru with my wife. We're doing another, what we call a work-cation, where we're just indefinitely traveling with no real return date.

Where we're going to be working and adventuring and seeing some cool stuff like Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca. We're going to try to do an Amazon river cruise for a few days for my birthday in mid-November.

And really looking forward to that. As of the day this episode airs, it'll be tomorrow that I head out for that. I'm trying to get a little head on the podcast right now so that I don't have to be on the treadmill for podcasts while we're traveling. But inevitably, I always will record a few while we're traveling, just so keep up to date with what's going on with the adventures.

And as I'm traveling, I'm still working and learning, and I always have topics I want to talk about on that. So that'll be upcoming probably late November. You'll start to see episodes from me actually in Peru or Brazil or wherever we're at in South America. But I just want to give that quick update. So the topic for today's show is something that is, unfortunately, near and dear to my heart because of what's recently happened. So if you're new to this podcast or you haven't heard anything recently, on September 29th, my Facebook account was compromised. Now, I don't personally care about Facebook. I don't use Facebook like most people. However, I am a huge user of Facebook and Meta ads because I put a lot of money into paid advertising for my businesses, especially on Instagram. If you don't already know this, Meta owns Instagram and Facebook. So if you want to advertise on Instagram, you have to use Meta or AKA Facebook ads in order to promote on Instagram, which is the main area that I use. And so what sucks about that September 29th hacking, if you want to call it that, is that they gained access to our ads account and did a bunch of nefarious stuff. Long story short, is I didn't have access to my ads account for 19 days. So that was 19 days that we didn't get to generate new leads through one of our biggest avenues of new leads that are constantly bringing us in thousands of leads a month. I didn't get to do that.

And they spent over $3,000 promoting an elderly women's bra on my ads account. So I haven't calculated what this has cost me, but besides the $3,000 plus that they spent, which ultimately Meta wiped away anyways, once I gained access to my account anyway, so I didn't have to spend that. But other than the $3,000 of wasted ad spend they did there, I also likely missed out on tens of thousands of lost opportunity of what I would have generated from generating new leads for all my businesses on Meta ads during that 19 day period. Because I spend a significant amount, $10,000, $15,000 a month on ads right now, at least. We'll probably be scaling that up soon.

And that generates four to five X ROI in the short term, and probably double that long term for my businesses. So 19 days without ads is a significant cost to my business. And that was the real issue here, is when I lost access to my personal Facebook account, and thus my ad accounts, I had the opportunity cost of losing out on 19 days of paid ads for myself. So this was a big expense for me, like tens of thousands of dollars lost during this time.