Stealing another person’s identity – harassment
When it comes to the internet and social media, it is really easy to take someone’s identity and use it as your own. There is a chance that the victim might not even find out about the occurrence of such an event. This is really common on platforms such as Instagram – where there can be several accounts impersonating the same person (influencer for example). However, even today, Instagram has yet to find a way to battle all these misrepresentations effectively and to make sure that these do not happen in the future.
How a Welsh novelist (Joe Dunthorne) was a victim of identity-theft
Joe Dunthorne was a novelist, who personally was an active user of the “Twitter” platform and had no online presence over Instagram. One day it came to his attention that a fake instagram account had been set up under his name and it also gained a lot of followers. Then, Joe himself had created an instagram account and contacted the fraud account but just ended up being blocked. Joe had tried to reach out to the company as well, but to no avail.
How the fraud account operated
The fake account took posts that Joe had posted on his twitter account and used them as content for Instagram. The fraud in this case, knew that since the original creator had no online presence on instagram, the followers would believe that this account is authentic. Joe once made a fake account of himself and contacted the imposter account (acting as a fan). He eventually understood through the conversations, that anyone’s image can be messed with through fraud accounts such as this. He found it really frightening when he saw that the impersonator gave his own personal phone number to a fan he just started communicating with, as well as asking questions like “Are you single?”. Later, Joe also noticed that the fraud was using his persona to get his followers to buy cryptocurrency from his friend (most probably another fake account that is impersonating another person).
How Instagram deals with such situations
It is one of the biggest priorities for companies like Instagram to protect the image of their users and prevent them from becoming victims of impersonation. There is a reporting system that would allow any user to send a request, so that any unfortunate matter at hand is looked into. However, since there are millions and millions of users, it is not likely that all requests of such cases can be responded to. This is why it would help if multiple users report on the same issue, since this would increase the chances of the company to know about the situation and to deal with it.
My personal views on the matter
For influencers, it is better to be present on most platforms in the online space. The reason for this is that people with a lot of followers can initially already get a hold of their fan base, and this would prevent anyone else to make a fraud account that could end up having more followers than the actual influencer him or herself. If anyone makes another fake account, provided that the influencer already has an account on the platform, then the original creator can warn its followers and tell them to report the fraud account. This would have a greater chance in taking down the fake profile and would prevent any followers from getting any wrong information about the creator or possibly being scammed.
For normal day-to-day users, I believe cyber threats such as these are harder to deal with since the victim in this case might not have too many followers who can help report the fake account. The most such users could do in this case, is to warn their family and friends about the account. Furthermore, Instagram has added the feature for users to make their account private (if they want to). This feature helps users to choose the people they would want to view their posts (only followers can see and non-followers can not).
References:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-60325386
https://www.redpoints.com/blog/how-to-report-an-impersonation-account-on-instagram/
As you mentioned trying to impersonate someone on social media can lead to unfortunate circumstances. It also falls under violation of privacy and copyright. It is very unethical to copy someone’s identity and take advantage of it. This becomes a severe issue when the victim is a celebrity. These days every teenager has social media accounts and almost every teen has a personal favourite celebrity. They tend to follow everything they do and hope the celebrity will recognise them in some way. So trying to impersonate a celebrity can lead to awful situations especially in the case of teenagers because teens are young and still learning. I don’t think Instagram still has a method of identifying fake profiles, they just rely on the number of reports on the fake profile. After which they will investigate and decide what to do. So, in my opinion this is a very lousy security feature for a company this big. Great post!
I’ve actually known people who had their instagram accounts hacked, and have been effectively locked out of them. Even after contacting the company, the issues still don’t seem to be resolved and these fake accounts are still operational on the platform. Interestingly enough, they were also victims of some scam involving crypto-currency, where the user clicks on some link that leads them to some fake site. It’s essentially your basic phishing scam, but even better since it is done from an account that appears to be legitimate. If my friend were to send me a link today, I wonder whether or not I would stop to question its legitimacy.
I suppose a potential work-around could be instagram enforcing some identity-confirmation process, like photo-validation. I’ve seen this used on dating apps before, and I think it can be pretty tough to beat it (unless you use some photo-editing/deep fakes). But, this would be a major barrier to entry, hopefully acting as a deterrent if nothing else.
Interesting post. With the advent of social media platforms, identity theft is now still an important problem. In my opinion as well, agreeing with the author of this post, is that people especially the celebrities should have online presence in all the popular social media platforms as this will reduce the chances of identity theft. Another important step that the Instagram can take into consideration is that reporting. On Facebook, if multiple reports are made on an account saying that the account is fake, the Facebook seems to be effectively take down the reported account. If necessary steps are not taken, the situation may gets even worse.
Nice post! I did not expect someone would be bold enough to impersonate a well known novelist. With instagram being so popular over previous years incidents like this is a big problem. It was surprising to hear this fruad account have been existing for some periods of time, and also surprised that instagram did not do any immediate action against this fraud account! Was the scammer caught and was punished? Impersonation fraud in my opinion is a serious issue to a person’s privacy because its using someone else’s identity to take the advantage!
Unfortunately, this is the current world of social media and some particular individuals trying to access other accounts. Hearing about these situations is tough, but if more and more people are aware these happen, they will take the effort to put in the extra time and secure their accounts. This is why while people learn how to do wrong with their knowledge, we have to counter that by learning more about security and implement ideas like multi-factor authentication to our accounts to protect ourselves. At first I found it “annoying” to do the extra steps and make my passwords more complex, and/or verify my log-ins with one trusted device, but now I see that it strongly prevents others from accessing my accounts.
Great post! I totally agree, due to the number of users of Instagram, the majority reports go under noticed. I also receive so many fraud and fake messages too. Sometimes the messages seem to influence people and getting into scams for
bitcoin as well. Even the number of fake accounts I’ve come across is unbelievable. Overall, Great post!
Since social media services like Instagram are distinctly user-oriented,
there is continually an open door for impersonators to enter through. It is far too easy for individuals, or even bots, to create fraudulent accounts pretending to be someone else. As a result, many fall victim to these phishing schemes, taking the bait and giving away personal information or even money.
Although users may be swift to identify a fraudulent account now, there is always a back door free for crooks to pass through. Unfortunately, the average user is too quick to dismiss the likelihood of a breach, thus they don’t exercise sufficient care into their login credentials (I know this is especially true among my friend group). Because of this, impersonators can hack into the users’ official social accounts, causing adjacent friends to be even more vulnerable to identity theft.
Since Instagram cannot contain the numerous instances of these attacks, users can best protect themselves by verifying the identity of their friends before clicking on suspicious links.
Every other day, there is a new person who has their social media account hacked or taken over. There is a long way to go with security on social media. Nice post.
Informative post!! In todays world social media has been a part of our life and consumed us and everyday new people create profiles on Instagram and then again people try to pretend they are someone which violates the privacy of that person and is completely unethical, I hope Instagram realizes what is happening and creates some type of authentication so that people won’t pretend to be someone.
That was interesting post to read! I can’t believe that frausters did start to invent ways to take others identity and they are able to put other reputation in danger…But honestly we can predict that with the increase use of social media nowadays and people not leaving their phone for hours. I believe that trying to take someone’s else identifty can lead to unfortunate and serious conditions. I think these popular online platforms should provide more secure way to prevent these frausters and to keep all the personal information more secure.
The existence of fraudulent accounts is fraught with danger. Moving the original author’s posts and pretending to be the original author can gain a lot of followers and influence on social networks. It’s easy for a fraudster to start a scam in this way, before people realize it’s a fraudulent account. It will also do great harm to the reputation of the original author.
Lack of privacy is becoming a severe concern in today’s digitally reliant world; social media has become the standard, and most of us can’t spend more than a few minutes without checking our social media accounts, as it has become an addiction. Millions of people trust Instagram to keep their data safe, yet they often overlook online scams and the risks that come with using these social media platforms. Identity theft is one of the most prevalent ways scammers use it to defraud people, as you highlighted in your blog. When we share our regular activities on social media, we put ourselves in danger of identity theft. You can stay safe on Instagram by keeping your photographs private and looking for fake profiles.
I feel like impersonation is an issue with all social media, it just so happens that it is easier to impersonate someone on places like Instagram. The unfortunate thing I have found out is that it’s usually people behind these fake accounts trying to scam others, instead of a bot (although those to exist too). That is to say someone is making a conscious effort to reply to people, post images, and make connections with others, it almost adds an extra level of intimacy rather than setting up a bot or letting a virus do all the work for you. I had this happen to me recently where a friends “dad” contacted me on Instagram. The account had 0 posts and followers and was avoiding any personal questions I had. I promptly threw expletives their way and reported the account.
Interesting read!
With the rise of social media in the recent years, identity theft has become a common things which is an important issue. I am pretty sure we all have received a message from an account trying to impersonate someone else. The company is still doesn’t have any method of identifying fake profiles. The only thing that could be done to bring down a fake account is to report. Even reporting sometimes doesn’t work, which is a big flaw in the company’s security algorithm.
Thank you for sharing this post!
Nowadays, the Internet is becoming more and more popular. On social platforms, many people’s identities and information have been stolen and used on themselves, including names and photos. They use someone else’s identity to defraud without the victim knowing. This has a serious impact on the victim’s reputation. For this situation, many software has not found a good and effective way to solve it.
I think it can increase the security of the account. For example, creating an account requires face recognition and ID to verify identity information. Social platforms can mark an authentication image under the authenticated account information to represent that the account was created and used by themselves.
With the rise of social media, it is common for people’s pictures and social media profiles to be copied and stolen for malicious purposes. I have encountered a few fake profiles imitating my friends, asking for my phone number as well (presumably to do a SIM swap attack). In this day and age, everybody needs to be extremely careful what kind of data they’re giving up, and who they are really talking to.
Recently, someone posed as a friend of mine on Instagram. They took photos from my friends’ account, reposted them, and uploaded insta stories, all of which had captions directing towards linktree and onlyfans links. It is scary how easily someone can impersonate you, and in this case, they tried to scam people, which I assume by the links. This could have harmed my friend’s image and reputation. Fortunately, my friend has a large enough following on Instagram that the account was dealt with after numerous people reported it. I believe Instagram should increase the security of their platform, such as by requiring face cognition or ID verification. This could help decrease the number of identity thefts, fake accounts and bots.
Good Post! I find the messages that the owner of the fake account sent to be rather disturbing. I agree that if one is an influencer (or anyone with a decent amount of fame), they should create accounts on multiple social media sites rather than a single one, in order to have one credible and popular account, with which they can denounce fake accounts with. Instagram’s account reporting system presents a difficult problem, on one hand, a situation like Joe’s can be very frustrating, knowing that Instagram won’t do anything to take down this fake account (issues regarding the volume of requests aside). On the other hand, it is most likely quite difficult to figure out who the real Joe is from Instagrams perspective, meaning they don’t know whether they should take the “fake” account down (especially if the fake account has gained a large number of followers, they would look like the real Joe).
Good post!
Because of the fake account problems on Instagram, I begin to hardly use Instagram this year. Since I’m a fan of off-road cars and I own a 4th-gen Pajero and a 3rd-gen Jimny, I have subscribed to many accounts held by Jimny owners and Pajero owners on Instagram. Last year, a fake Instagram account that pretended to be owned by a famous person in the field of off-road cars sent messages to me, asking me to click a link provided in the messages to join a car club. I found that the link looked very weird, similar to the phishing links in those phishing quizzes. Then, I realized that was a fake account. After a week, some of my friends told me they were scammed by that fake account.
I think one of the good ways to deal with the fake account problems on Instagram is to recommend the Instagram owner company use face recognition technology to verify their users’ identities. This is because I think it is very hard to “copy” a person’s real face.
Thanks for an interesting post! Firstly, it is alarming. I hope there are no or not many people were scammed by the fake account. This is not the only case in Instagram and other social media. Secondly, it is also about copyright. It is completely possible for “faker” to steal author’s video, blog, novel, etc. and share it in other platforms. Until tech companies solve the issue, we, users and authors, have to protect ourselves by being extra cautious.
Yes, for sure! This is the main lesson I want all the students to get from my post! Just make sure while you are on the internet, try to be extra cautious and I would also say, to have more accounts on all social medias so you would be the first one for all the people to know about. If anyone else cloned your work and showed it as their’s, people would find out easily.
This story honestly was kind of close to home for me. I was not the one that’s identity was stolen, but my sister did fall victim to this. It was really upsetting to see no matter how many times we tried reporting the account and trying to get rid of the compromised account, Instagram did little to nothing about the matter. The attacker got some of my sister’s personal information and was threatening to leak it unless she would make a video promoting a scam service which then they would post on her story and lock her out of the account so she couldn’t stop it. It is a issue but thank you for making this post thats sheds some light on it.