Support Theater
My son got $40 in Gorilla Tag gift cards for his birthday. He has a parent-managed Meta account - the kind Meta requires for kids under 13 - and the gift cards wouldn’t redeem to his account. So I bought him $50 in Meta credits directly, thinking that would let him buy what he wanted in-game. Those didn’t work either. $90 total, locked somewhere in Meta’s system, inaccessible.
I opened a support case. Case #09205181. What followed was the single worst customer support experience I’ve had with any company, and I’ve been through Comcast hold queues.
The first agent asked for my full name, my son’s account details, and the gift card codes. I provided everything. The second agent greeted me warmly - fresh introduction, fresh name, same questions. I provided everything again. The third agent did the same thing. Then the fourth. Then the fifth.
Five different agents in a single day, each one opening with a variation of “Hi Mark, welcome back to Meta Store Support, hope this email finds you well.” Each one asking for information sitting right there in the thread they were replying to. None of them investigating anything.
The fifth agent, Cullen, tried something new. Instead of asking me for information I’d already given, he asked me to do his job - log into auth.meta.com with my son’s account and report back whatever error messages I saw. The support process had outsourced the investigation to the customer.
I replied. I was direct. I pointed out the pattern - five agents, five identical greetings, five requests for the same information, zero investigation. I asked them to stop and actually look at what I’d already sent. I asked for escalation.
Agent number six replied within the hour. Cherry. “Hi Mark, welcome back to Meta Store Support. Hope this email finds you well.”
She asked if I had attempted to redeem the gift card. The thing I’d explained in my very first message. The thing five agents had already asked about. The thing sitting in the thread she was replying to.
Then she wrote this sentence: “After we receive the information you have provided, we will be happy to investigate further.”
She acknowledges the information exists - I’ve provided it - and then says they need to receive it before they can act. It’s contradictory within a single sentence.
Nobody is reading anything. These aren’t humans - the pattern makes that obvious. An agent opens the case, scans for a category, generates a warm greeting and a template response, and hands it off. The next one does the same thing. Six times. Each with a different name, each with the same inability to actually read the thread or do anything with the information in it. It’s support as performance - every element of helpfulness present except the help itself.
What makes this worse is the context. Meta built the parent-managed account system. They require it for kids under 13. They sell gift cards designed to be redeemed on these accounts. And when their own system breaks at the intersection of these two things they built, there’s no one on the other end who can actually look at the account and figure out what’s wrong. Six agents deep and not a single one has touched the actual system.
$90 isn’t a lot of money. But it’s birthday money and a dad’s attempt to work around a broken system, all locked behind a support process that exists to look like support without functioning as support. The cruelty isn’t in the dollar amount - it’s in the theater.
Then the account got suspended. Age verification, according to Meta - triggered, I can only assume, by the support thread itself. I asked for help, asked for escalation, and the system responded by locking the account.
To unsuspend, I need to enter my son’s birthday - the exact date I used when I created the account. I don’t use my kids’ real birthdays on platforms - I use dates close to their real ones because I don’t want their personal information sitting in systems I don’t control. My son is well past Meta’s age threshold, but I can’t remember the precise date I entered when we created his account, and Meta’s verification requires an exact match. No alternative path, no human to work through it with.
The account is effectively bricked. Not because my son is too young, not because we violated any policy - because I asked for support, something in the process flagged the account, and the recovery gate assumes perfect recall of a date I deliberately made inexact for privacy reasons.
My son bought his Quest with his own money last summer. He’s concluded that Meta stole his birthday money and his account. We’re buying a Steam Frame as soon as they’re available, and Meta won’t see another dollar from us.