Meta - Reviews and experiences

we’d approved a six-figure budget to get our Australian gym back into advertising in CY2026 after shelving campaigns for a while (click fraud, meh results, you know the drill). I needed the platform to work — new classes, new location, people with back issues showing up who actually need us — and instead I hit a brick wall pretty fast.
What stood out, and what I want to call out here, was the pay-to-talk setup. After hours of digging through useless help articles, we found that the only “live” support route was to sign up for Meta Business Verified and pay A$470 per month. That’s not a little fee; it’s basically a toll to access basic account help. We tried it (because what else were we supposed to do), connected to an offshore call centre and went through multiple Level 1 reps who could only tell us the account was restricted and that the company was banned from advertising. No specifics, no appeal option, nothing we could use to fix it.
We asked for escalation and got a boilerplate email from someone calling himself a supervisor — language was shaky, no real answers, and the same final decision. The most likely “violation” we found was a rejected ad for self-defence classes labelled under “Politics/War,” even though the images were just people training in a studio. So either the moderation is broken or the rules are opaque to the point of uselessness.
I’m a legal professional with a reputation to keep, and I’ve always tried to follow platform terms, so the whole experience felt unfair and poorly managed. It’s disappointing that a business ready to spend significant money is treated like this: forced payment for basic support, no transparency, and no meaningful escalation. There’s a tiny bit of relief that we at least found out what happened (after paying), but it came with needing to jump through unnecessary hoops. If you’re an advertiser, or thinking of becoming one, be aware that you might be asked to pay to even find out why your account is locked — and there may be no real remedy.