My latest attempt to reclaim my wife's stolen email address from Facebook

You cannot reclaim a personal email address used by a stranger’s Facebook account. Facebook’s procedures do nothing. 

Today I tried something different.

To review, a year or so ago my wife started getting Facebook notifications from “Ding”. Her iCloud email address was used by “Ding Ling” (https://www.facebook.com/ding.ling.98031) to create a Facebook account. I don’t know if my wife accidentally validated it or not but we’ve been unable to retrieve her email address.

Since we control the email we can reset the account password, but Facebook’s poorly documented procedures to reclaim the address did nothing.

So this time I again reset the password but then I followed Facebook’s directions to upload a legal ID (a way to take control of the account):

I used my drivers license as a template to get past Facebook’s image size test then overlayed a text image requesting release of her email address.

I’ll update this post if it works. 

Yeah, there should be a law.

Update 10/29/2017

It worked. It took a few go rounds. Eventually I was directed to the same kind of form I’d submitted a year ago, but this time it got to a human. I had to send a summary response email from Emily’s iCloud account. I think it helped to point out that “Ding Ling” was obviously a fake account. Once the email was retrieved I added it to her account.

I wonder if somehow it mattered that Emily has both an iCloud and a “me” address for the same account (due to Apple’s old mobile.me migration). Her .me address was already associated with her Facebook account.