Holy shit! Snuck in on the end of one of their updates:

"For those asking about their lost characters or rank, those will not be able to be restored..."

I'm glad I didn't have any serious time investment on mine, but if you look around you can find people who had already attained lvl 100 who lost their character, lost their millions of GTA$, and any other progress they had made.

For those of you who join now, the character loss issues are fixed, but goddamn