Ga. lawyer says he was awarded $50K after suing Facebook for deleting his profile

COLUMBUS, Ga. — A Georgia lawyer won more than $50,000 from Facebook parent-company Meta after he sued the company, which he said deleted his account.

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According to the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Jason Crawford, of Columbus, sued the social media platform in August 2022 after his account was deleted earlier that month.

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It all started when Crawford logged on to his account on August 15, and a window popped up telling him that he had violated Facebook’s laws on child sexual exploitation. He later learned that his account had been hacked, according to the Ledger-Enquirer.

Crawford filed a $50,000 lawsuit on August 18, claiming that he lost valuable family photos when his account was deleted.

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Meta ignored the lawsuit, but since Crawford is a lawyer himself, he knew what to do: He hired another lawyer, who hired a private investigator to track down a Meta bank account in Columbus and garnish it.

Meta was supposed to respond to the lawsuit within 45 days but ignored it, according to Macon.com. So a judge ruled in February that the company had defaulted on the lawsuit and awarded Crawford $50,000.

On Tuesday, Crawford was awarded a default judgment for $52,325.89 from the Muscogee County Superior Court in Columbus.

And what did he do with it? Posted the photo of the check on Facebook, of course.

“When I finally spoke with a human, Facebook never offered a single penny, even though I had a $50,000 judgment against them. They simply went back to ignoring me,” Crawford wrote on his Facebook account. “Well, it turns out they bank with Bank of America. We garnished their account, and just like that, I collected the entire judgment with interest.”

The check was written out by the Clerk of Superior and State Court in Muscogee County, which Bank of America paid the money to, according to Crawford.

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