Can you delete someone else's Facebook account without their password?

No. Deleting a Facebook account is an action bound to a logged-in session, so it is available only to whoever is signed in. Meta operates no admin override, no support agent has a delete button for another user's profile, and no public or private API exposes account removal to a third party. Anything sold as a workaround falls into three categories: an outright scam where the seller vanishes with your money, a credential-phishing front that asks you to log in with your own Facebook and takes that account instead, or genuine intrusion into the target account. In the United States the last of those is unauthorised access under 18 U.S.C. § 1030, and paying someone to do it is not a lesser act than doing it yourself. Our team never asks for a password or a login code, from any party, at any stage of a case.

How do I permanently delete a deceased relative's Facebook account?

Bereavement is the one situation where Meta will delete an account for someone who does not own it. Use Meta's request to remove a deceased family member's account, and submit the profile URL, proof of death such as a death certificate, and proof that you are an immediate family member or the estate's executor — typically a birth certificate, a will, or letters of administration. Meta offers two outcomes: memorialisation, which locks the profile and adds a "Remembering" prefix while keeping it visible, or full removal, which is irreversible. If your family is undecided, memorialise first; a memorialised profile can still be removed later, but a removed one cannot be restored by anyone. A legacy contact can manage a memorialised profile but cannot delete it unless the account holder enabled deletion-after-death themselves. A complete first submission is generally decided within days to a few weeks; an incomplete one stalls considerably longer.

How many reports does it take to delete a Facebook account?

There is no number, because Meta keeps no counter. Each report opens its own case, tested against one specific Community Standard, and the evidence decides the outcome rather than the headcount. Fifty complaints about a rule-following profile produce fifty closed cases and no removal. Worse, a sudden coordinated burst of identical reports reads as manipulation, which Meta treats as a violation in its own right — enforcement in those situations tends to land on the people reporting rather than the person they aimed at. Three things actually decide a case: which rule the report named, whether the content plainly demonstrates that violation, and what the reported account's enforcement history already looks like. This is why one accurate, well-documented impersonation report routinely outperforms a hundred coordinated ones. Anyone quoting you a specific report threshold is describing a mechanism that does not exist, usually shortly before asking for payment.

Is it illegal to delete someone else's Facebook account?

Deleting an account you do not own generally requires accessing it without authorisation, and that is a criminal matter in most jurisdictions rather than merely a terms-of-service problem. United States federal law treats it as unauthorised access to a protected computer under 18 U.S.C. § 1030, with exposure reaching the person who commissioned the act as well as the person who carried it out. Computer-misuse legislation in the UK, Canada, Australia and most EU member states follows the same logic. Using stolen credentials, resetting a password through an email account you control but do not own, or paying a service to break in are all versions of the same offence. Submitting knowingly false impersonation or copyright reports to force a removal carries separate liability. The legitimate routes — a next-of-kin request, an impersonation report, a policy report, or a court order served on Meta — carry no such risk because they ask Meta to act rather than acting in Meta's place.

How do I delete a Facebook account I can no longer log into?

Recover access first, because deletion lives behind the login and there is no route around it. Start at facebook.com/hacked or the standard password reset, working through whichever recovery email address or phone number is still reachable. If Meta disabled the account rather than you simply losing it, that is an enforcement action and must be appealed before any deletion is possible. Once you are signed in, the current path is Settings and privacy, then Settings, then Accounts Center, then Personal details, then Account ownership and control, then Deactivation or deletion — choose Delete account rather than Deactivate. This is what most people actually mean when they search how to delete someone facebook account permanently: the account is theirs, but it was created on an email address or phone number that stopped working years ago. A large share of the Facebook cases that reach our desk turn out to be exactly this situation.

What is the difference between deactivating and permanently deleting a Facebook account?

Deactivation is reversible and deletion is not. Deactivating hides your profile, photos and posts from other people while keeping everything intact on Meta's servers, and logging back in restores it instantly — Messenger can even keep working while deactivated. Permanent deletion starts a 30-day grace period during which any login cancels the request, including an accidental one through a third-party app that still holds a Facebook session. After day 30 the profile is gone from Facebook, and copies may persist in Meta's backup systems for up to a further 90 days as a storage-hygiene window, not a recovery one. Some content never disappears at all: messages you sent live in the recipients' inboxes and stay there regardless. The figure is 30 days then 90, not the 180 days several long-lived blog posts still repeat. If you are unsure which you want, deactivate — you can always delete later.

Do Facebook deletion services and mass-report bots work?

No, and the product being sold does not exist. Every FB delete service, ban panel and mass-report bot on the market claims access to a removal lever Meta never built for third parties, which is why their sales pages are interchangeable down to the identical success percentages and turnaround times quoted by supposedly unrelated sellers. Statistics that survive being copied between competing companies were never measurements. What buyers actually receive is one of three things: silence after payment, a credential-harvesting page that takes their own account, or a spam script whose junk reports Meta discards while flagging the accounts sending them. Investigative reporting has repeatedly tied this trade to account theft and resale, meaning the sellers are often the people best placed to steal from you. We do not operate these services and will not run coordinated reporting for any client. If you have already paid someone, report it at reportfraud.ftc.gov.

How to Delete Someone's Facebook Account Permanently in 2026

You cannot delete someone else's Facebook account. Searches for how to delete someone facebook account permanently all reach the same wall: only Meta removes a profile, and only for a verified impersonation, a policy breach serious enough to disable it, a deceased user's next of kin, or a court order. Anything else is either your own account or a scam.

Reputation specialist reviewing next-of-kin paperwork and impersonation evidence while checking how to delete someone Facebook account.

Four different problems, one search box

Four very different people type how to delete someone facebook account into Google in the same hour, and Meta routes every one of them somewhere else.

One has just lost a parent and wants the profile down before the birthday reminders start. One is locked out of an account they opened in 2011, on an email address that stopped existing three jobs ago. One has found a cloned profile using their photos to message their friends. A fourth wants a real person gone — an ex, a rival, someone who will not stop.

Sorting yourself into the right row is most of the work here. Send it to the wrong queue and it quietly dies.

What you actually want	Who can do it	Realistic outcome
Remove a deceased relative's profile	Meta, on a verified next-of-kin request	Removal, or memorialisation instead
Delete an account you own but cannot sign into	You, once access is restored	Full deletion
Remove a fake profile impersonating you	Meta, after an impersonation report	Removal, if you prove identity
Remove a real person's real, rule-following account	Nobody	Nothing

A large share of the Facebook cases that reach our desk asking about deleting someone's account turn out to be the second row — a locked-out owner, not a third party. People describe their own account as "someone's" because they no longer feel like the owner of it. That last row is the one nobody wants to read, and it gets its own section below. The other three are all winnable, and the page and post variants of the same problem are set out in our full Facebook takedown guide.

Can you delete someone's Facebook account without their password?

No. Deletion is an action bound to a logged-in session, which means it is available to exactly one party: whoever is signed in. There is no admin override, no support agent with a delete button, and no API that exposes account removal to a third party. This is not a gap Meta forgot to close. It is the design, and it is the same design on every major platform, which is why the answers for Instagram, X and TikTok all land in the same place.

That leaves people hunting for a workaround, and the workaround market has exactly three products. The first is nothing: you pay, the seller stops replying, the money is gone. The second is credential phishing, where a "deletion panel" asks you to sign in with your own Facebook first, and the only account that disappears is yours. The third is actual intrusion — someone breaking into the target account to delete it from inside. United States law treats that as unauthorised access under 18 U.S.C. § 1030, and commissioning it is not a lesser act than performing it. Computer-misuse law in the UK, Canada and most of the EU works the same way.

So the honest framing is not "how do I get past the password." It is "which of Meta's own removal routes does my situation qualify for."

Decision diagram comparing the four legitimate routes to delete someone Facebook account against scam deletion panels.

The next-of-kin request: the one deletion Meta performs for someone else

There is exactly one situation where Meta will delete an account on the word of a person who does not own it, and it is bereavement. Through its request to remove a deceased family member's account, Meta offers two outcomes, and choosing between them matters more than most people realise.

Memorialisation is the default. The profile stays visible, gains a "Remembering" prefix, stops surfacing in birthday reminders and People You May Know, and cannot be logged into by anyone. Removal is the other option: the profile, its photos and its message history come down for good. A memorialised profile can still be removed later. A removed one cannot be brought back, by anybody, at any price — which is why families who are unsure should memorialise first and decide in six months.

Removal needs documentation, not just a relationship. Meta asks for the profile URL, proof of death — usually a death certificate — and proof that you are an immediate family member or the executor of the estate, which in practice means a birth certificate, a will, or letters of administration. A legacy contact, if the person named one, can manage a memorialised profile but cannot delete it, unless the account holder switched on deletion-after-death in their own memorialisation settings while alive.

When our team files these, the requests that move fastest are the plain ones: certificate, proof of relationship, profile URL. Padding the form with explanation slows it down. A complete first submission is generally decided in a matter of days to a few weeks; an incomplete one stalls far longer, because the queue returns it rather than chasing you for the missing document.

How to delete someone facebook account permanently when that someone is you

Just under half the traffic for this question is people trying to delete their own account and unable to get into it. It is a recovery problem wearing a deletion problem's clothes, and it has a fixed order of operations.

Get back in first. Deletion lives behind the login, so every route runs through facebook.com/hacked or a standard password reset before anything else can happen. If the account was disabled by Meta rather than merely lost, that is an enforcement action on a separate track — the appeal route is set out in our guide to appealing a disabled Facebook account, and no deletion is possible until it resolves.

Once you are signed in, the path as of August 2026 runs: Settings & privacy → Settings → Accounts Center → Personal details → Account ownership and control → Deactivation or deletion. Pick the profile, choose Delete account rather than Deactivate account, download your information if you want to keep it, and confirm with your password.

Deactivation and deletion are not two words for the same thing. Deactivation hides the profile and keeps everything, and you undo it simply by logging back in. Deletion starts a countdown that ends with the data gone. People pick the wrong one constantly, then assume an account is deleted while it sits quietly intact.

What "permanently" buys you: 30 days, then 90

Permanent is not immediate, and the gap between the two catches people out in both directions.

Meta's own documentation on permanently deleting a profile sets a 30-day grace period after you submit the request. Log in during those 30 days — even by accident, even through a third-party app still holding a Facebook session — and the deletion cancels itself. That is the most common reason an account somebody swears they deleted is still there a month later.

After day 30 the profile is gone from Facebook. Copies can persist in Meta's backup systems for up to a further 90 days, which is a storage-hygiene window rather than a recovery one; nothing in it is reachable by you, by support, or by anyone else. Some content is never deleted at all, because it does not belong to the account alone. Messages you sent live in the recipients' inboxes, and they stay there.

Not 180 days, whatever a dozen recycled blog posts still claim. Thirty, then ninety. Our walkthrough on recovering a deleted Facebook account covers what remains possible inside the window and what genuinely is not after it.

Timeline diagram explaining how to delete someone Facebook account permanently, with 30-day grace and 90-day backup purge.

Not sure which of the four situations you are actually in? Send the profile URL and two lines of context to our case desk for a free 60-minute review. If there is no route, we will tell you that instead of selling you one.

Reporting a fake or abusive profile is a separate road

Reporting is not deletion, and conflating the two is why so many reports feel like shouting into a well. A report asks Meta to test one specific profile against one specific rule. If the rule was broken, Meta acts — a content removal, a feature restriction, sometimes a disabled account. If it was not, the case closes and nothing happens, however strongly you feel about it.

Impersonation is the strongest card in this hand, because it is the one violation where you hold the evidence. A profile using your name and your photographs to contact people you know is a clean, provable breach, and Meta's impersonation form asks for government ID precisely so it can be decided quickly. Harassment, threats and scam accounts are also actionable, but they need documentation rather than adjectives.

Volume does nothing. Fifty reports against one profile produce fifty separate cases judged on the same evidence, and a sudden coordinated burst reads as manipulation, which is a violation in itself. Our guide to getting someone banned from Facebook sets out this route step by step, including which report category to pick.

Leaving Facebook because of someone: a safety order of operations

If the reason you are deleting an account is a person, sequence matters, and deleting first is usually the wrong move.

Evidence disappears with the account. Before anything else, screenshot the messages, the posts, the profile URLs and the dates, then save them somewhere the other person cannot reach. Deleted content is gone for you as well as for them, and a police report or a protective order two months from now depends on material you no longer have. WomensLaw's guidance on permanently deleting a profile works through the same trade-off for people in abusive situations.

Then check who else holds a key. Recovery email addresses, phone numbers, linked Instagram accounts and trusted contacts set years ago are how an ex-partner keeps a route back in, and a deletion that leaves those in place on a rebuilt account solves nothing.

Deactivation is often the better first step. It removes the profile from view immediately and reversibly, which buys time to gather evidence and talk to someone without a 30-day clock running.

Warning concept illustration of credential-harvesting scams that promise to delete someone Facebook account for a fee.

What we won't do, and what nobody can sell you

Nobody sells account deletion, because nobody has it to sell. Every "FB delete service", ban panel and mass-report bot on the market is renting out a lever Meta never built for third parties, and the sales pages are interchangeable down to the success percentage — we have catalogued how these operations actually behave in our breakdowns of paid Facebook ban services, whether mass reporting works on Facebook, and telling a legitimate Facebook service from a scam.

Our own limits are written down rather than implied. We do not take cases whose goal is removing a real person's lawful account, because there is no route to that outcome and pretending there is would be the scam. We never ask for a password or a login code, from any party, at any stage. We do not file false impersonation or copyright claims. We guarantee no removal and no timeline: clean recovery and reporting work typically resolves in 24–72 hours to a few weeks, durable search suppression takes 90–180 days, and anything faster is a sales figure rather than an operational one. Those boundaries are set out in full in what we will and won't take on.

We do take the first three rows of that table. Bereaved families and impersonation victims, mostly, plus a steady stream of owners locked out of accounts that were always theirs. Every case is assessed by a named specialist before anyone is asked for anything.