“Hey, I think someone made a fake instagram account of you.”
Now that was a message that I didn’t expect to wake up to. It isn’t every day you discover that your photos are being used to “catfish” people – a term loosely defined as deceit through a false identity online.
Unlike the majority of “catfishes,” who use the photos of their victims under different names or personas, the individual who targeted me attempted to assume my entire identity. The account they created featured an almost identical username to mine, my first and middle name, my photos and my list of followers. My account, @_kellyelise, was now followed in the search bar by the fake @__kellyelise. This person wasn’t just using my face to deceive people; they were using my life.
Immediately after reading my messages, I jumped out of my bed. The panic that sets in when you realize you’ve lost control of your identity is probably the most effective alarm clock you’ll ever have. I began texting my friends asking if the catfish had contacted them, and to my dismay, many of them had been followed by the fake account. I couldn’t actually view the account, as they had me blocked from the moment they created it, but enough people gave me information on it that I was able to log out of my account and view their page remotely.
A couple of my followers had actually spoken to the catfish, assuming that the account’s claims that I had simply made a second Instagram were true. While none of the messages the catfish sent out seemed to be genuinely malicious, they bordered on perverted and strange. In one instance, the catfish reached out to a girl I had known from my high school cheerleading team. The catfish began a casual conversation with the girl then proceeded to ask her if she had ever attempted various sexual acts. Luckily, my cheerleader friend knew me well enough to recognize that this-so-called “Kelly” wasn’t really me.
I quickly posted a screenshot of the fake account on my actual Instagram, captioning it to let my followers know that “Kelly’s new Instagram” wasn’t me at all. I figured that at least that way, anyone who received a strange message could tell it was a fake account. As people sent me screenshots of the messages they received from the account, I almost felt bad for the catfish. Clearly, this person was someone who didn’t feel comfortable in his or her own skin. Of course that didn’t make what they were doing okay, but it did make me wonder what led them to that extreme. I couldn’t imagine what would cause someone to assume a fake identity just to reach out to other people.
I, along with many others, was first introduced to “catfishing” via MTV’s show Catfish, but I had never really seen myself as being at risk for it. While I’ve always known that what I post online is permanent, I am generally a low-profile person who keeps to myself. The majority of people who I am in contact with online are people who I know personally. In fact, it wasn’t until I entered the field of journalism that any of my photos, tweets or posts online were open to public viewing. I was advised almost immediately my freshman year to become a public presence online to build my following in communications. But even with this publicity, I still suspect my catfish is someone I know in real life.
After a couple hours of digging around, changing my passwords and setting my accounts back to “private,” I sent out an official report to Instagram regarding the fake account. Instagram actually has a pretty good policy when it comes to impersonation, which led me to feel a lot more confident throughout my experience.
“Instagram takes safety seriously. If someone created an Instagram account pretending to be you, you can report it to us. Make sure to provide all the requested info, including a photo of your government-issued ID,” the official website says.
By the time I had collected all my evidence and identification, enough of my followers had called out the catfish that the account deleted all of their photos. They changed their username from @__kellyelise to @temp19711971, suggesting that their account was now a temporary page. After a couple of hours, the account was officially deleted. I had spent the vast majority of my day hunched over my computer repeatedly refreshing their page, and the relief I felt when the “page unavailable” notification popped up was immense.
Although the original catfish account is gone, there isn’t really any way for me to know that they didn’t create another page using my photos. Even though my account is now private, they clearly saved enough of my photos in the first place to build their original account. Plus, if it is in fact someone I know, they could still be following me and seeing everything I post. It’s definitely not comforting knowing that someone might still be using my face to deceive other people, but all I can hope for is that I was too much a nuisance for the catfish to keep using my pictures. I suppose that as long as my catfish isn’t using my name or contacting people who know me in real life, their actions (hopefully) wont affect me too much.
It was a pretty crazy experience, but it’s actually a lot more common than I expected. So many women had written about their identities being stolen on social media that I had a pretty good group of people to look to for advice. Compared to so many things that can happen online, someone using my face isn’t the end of the world.
My advice to you, collegiettes, is to be careful with who follows you and to be mindful about what you post. Thankfully, I have never posted a photo of myself that I have not deemed appropriate or as how I want to present myself. Judging your photos it totally up to you, and I completely respect everyone’s choice to be who they are and show what they want. Just keep in mind that someone may present your photo in a way that you didn’t intend, so, before uploading something, consider it’s potential.
Stay safe out there, collegiettes!
Photo Credit: 1