A close acquaintance of mine's Facebook account was hacked -- all of a sudden, they were logged out of their account, and their old password (say it was p4ssw0rd) is no longer working. I am trying to help them recover it.
The email originally used to create the account was from an old free provider that doesn't even exist anymore, so it's completely inaccessible; say that old email was acquaintance@oldprovider.com.
They've always used Facebook in the iPhone app. Now, in the iPhone app's login page, there appear two accounts: one is their old account, with their photo; and another with a blank photo (they swear they didn't create another account, but they're not so technology-savvy so I don't know if I believe them about this).
By clicking on the old account, the one showing their photo, they can still access that account. They can post there (they took the opportunity to warn their Facebook friends that they had been hacked), and I personally witnessed them changing their password for the old account; say the new password is hunter2.
Attempting to login using acquaintance@oldprovider.com and the password hunter2, they are directed to a blank Facebook profile -- no friends, no photos, etc. Going into Settings, it mentions a single email (one that is on Hotmail, that they have access to: say it's acquaintance@hotmail.com). There is no mention to the acquaintance@oldprovider.com email there.
Attempting to login with acquaintance@hotmail.com and password hunter2, they are also directed to the exact same blank Facebook profile.
Then we tried something different: the webpage for their old account on Facebook is e.g. https://facebook.com/their.name.here -- I found that by searching their name on my Facebook account. So we now tried to login using "their.name.here" rather than any email addresses. If we try the new password, hunter2, Facebook says it's wrong. If we try the old password, p4ssw0rd, it says it was changed a few hours ago, and offers to send a security code to acquaintance@oldprovider.com. Since they no longer have access to that email, we can't proceed?
So, does anyone have any idea what happened here to have these two different accounts, and if it would be possible to recover the old account which still has all their friends? Do note that the old account is somehow still accessible via the iPhone app, but with the caveats mentioned above. Does Facebook have an email, contact form, phone or some other way of reaching them?