> Hi,
We have reason to believe your account activity has violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your account banned. We received a large number of complaints about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we won't disclose the nature of the complaints.
Unfortunately, responses to this email thread won't be read.
Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually write to anyone besides family and close friends.
Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat as spam.
> We received a large number of complaints about your account
> Our only guess as to what could have caused this is that a week or so before the ban she received a spam message sent to a giant group and marked it as spam.
Each person in that group marked each other as spam?
I wonder if other people in that group ended up banned as well.
Or maybe somehow someone managed to enable WhatsApp web on her phone, or she used it on a public computer and forgot to turn it off? Otherwise, completely out of ideas.
This might be a bit esoteric but is WhatsApp the only such problems she's had?
On Reddit there is this group-stalking phenomenon where if someone (of limited maturity but rich in online contacts who seem to have nothing better to do with their time) for example disagrees with your post, they try to get their friends to get mods to ban you from subreddits by complaining of spam from your account via their inbox/messenger.
Failing that, they usually resort to bombarding Reddit with "concerns" about "wellbeing" which results in inboxes getting cluttered with "A concerned Reddit user reached out to us about your wellbeing" ...
I'm not saying it's that, but human spammers tend to work in networks that respond viciously to anything that messes with accounts they've set up as part of their networks, so if she reported them as spam and they somehow zeroed in on her or suspected her as one of the few possible causes of one of their accounts being flagged for spamming, perhaps they collectively retaliated against her out of spite?
I would think if that were the case she'd get some return calls and texts from people receiving the spams? There's been nothing aside from this whatsapp ban.
This is a known problem and (probably) there are systems which should monitor automated abuse of abuse.
However, all those social networks (including Instagram) are susceptible to another attack - just rent a horde of low-grade bots... and add the victim's account to their friends. This sudden increase in friends count are treated as an attempt to boost the rating of the bot accounts => ban not only for the bots (about whom you don't care) but for the victim too.
Perhaps OP is in the similar situation, though probably his spouse wasn't a target but a collateral.
I don't know about whatsapp but on tiktok you can easily do this successfully, without bots - they automatically permaban anyone who is reported just a handful of times.
All you have to do is make a few accounts or convince a few friends and you can remove any video or account on the app that you want.
Considering this thread, it looks like Whatsapp is the same way.
> We received a large number of complaints about your account
I hope this system is smart enough to only consider complaints from accounts that this user has messaged recently, otherwise, a group of people could decide to maliciously report an account.
But how would they determine this if it is true that they do not store messages on their servers?
> Hi, We have reason to believe your account activity has violated our Terms of Service and decided to keep your account banned. We received a large number of complaints about your account and to protect our users' privacy, we won't disclose the nature of the complaints. Unfortunately, responses to this email thread won't be read.
Unless her parents are complaining about her account, this is nuts. There's no conceivable way there could be a large number of complaints about an account that doesn't actually write to anyone besides family and close friends.
Increases my suspicion that it's related to that spam group message. Likely there were a bunch of complaints about that thread, and somehow her account got rolled into the ones that were banned, despite doing nothing besides blocking the chat as spam.