“My accounts have been banned – what next?” Anyone running multiple accounts, whether affiliate marketers, ecommerce specialists or more, will come across this question in their career. And when you’ve spent time carefully building up your business, only to have it disappear, the consequences can be devastating. That’s why, in this week’s article, we’re pulling back the curtain on some of the reasons accounts get banned and what you can do next.
Why are my accounts getting banned?
First up, let’s take a look at why platforms such as Facebook, eBay, Google or Amazon may be banning your accounts. While there is no hard-and-fast way to say the precise reason for an individual situation, the rule of thumb is that the platform thinks it has identified suspicious activity.
Now, for the well intentioned marketer who has somehow fallen afoul of this, what could it be? Common scenarios could include:
Inconsistencies in your behavior
If you have been using the same profile or ad account with inconsistencies in how it is used, that can ring alarm bells. For example, imagine that you’ve accessed the account through a VPN at one time with a specific geographic location, but then another time using a different geographical location. Likewise, perhaps you’re working in a team and you’ve accessed an account from the United States, while a colleague has done so from India.
In those cases, the platform is likely to see these as signs that you might be conducting suspicious activity – even if you’re not.
Inconsistencies in your account history
There are businesses and individuals out there who promote buying ‘warmed up’ accounts, which they claim have been set up with a history and profile that makes them immediately usable. This is, however, a big risk, as we have previously discussed.
For you as the new user of these accounts, you’re coming into them with likely a new geolocation, as well as a new IP, new behavior patterns – all things which will make them appear inconsistent, rather than consistent as promised.
Equally, there is, generally speaking, no way to guarantee the history of these accounts. If they’ve previously been used themselves for suspicious purposes, there’s no way back.
Similar identities across multiple accounts
If you have logged into multiple accounts using the same browser profile, then that will almost certainly see you flagged up. If you have tried to conceal or change your browser fingerprint using an imperfect solution, there are so many ways your true fingerprint can still be detected, from your public IP to your location, your system settings, your hardware and more. We have discussed this in much greater technical detail in our research articles, including our recent article on the risks of browser extensions (hint: even browser extensions which specifically say they protect you, in fact pose a very real risk).
Blocking fingerprinting
Now, you may think the easiest way to stop a platform from tracking you is to simply try to block fingerprinting efforts. Not so fast, tiger! It’s an instant flag in many ways that you are trying to conceal your identity – which again can lead to classification as suspicious activity.
What can you do when your accounts get banned?
The first port of call is to appeal, but as you will see from the experience of many other affiliate marketers, ecommerce specialists, social media agencies and so on, the chances of getting them back are tenuous.
The best action to take, therefore, is to start from day one protecting your accounts with a solution that helps to stop inconsistencies in behavior or accounts.
At Multilogin, our dedicated teams have invested and continue to invest thousands of hours of research and development to produce the strongest solution. The ‘native approach’ means that rather than trying to block fingerprinting efforts, or trying to spoof different ones, it provides you with a virtual browser profiles with its own customizable fingerprint which is then allowed to be read like any other natural computer or device.
Likewise, careful isolation of each profile means that your cookies, browsing history, cache and so on do not leak between each one. It is a completely separated virtual browsing environment.
To find out more about how this works, discover our various plans for solo users, smaller and scaling teams, as well as our custom options. The sky is the limit – where will you take your business?
