This is exactly what happened to Ellie Flynn, who wrote an article when someone did this to her.
Flynn writes that it became the norm to be approached by strangers, usually, men, calling her by various names.
someone’s been using my identity to catfish people for nearly ten years She writes,
Over the years, my friends and I have met a number of young men who’ve spent a substantial amount of time chatting to fake me—or fake versions of one of my friends—online. They often demand we show some form of ID to prove our surnames aren’t “Colarossi,” or “Rose,” or “Morrison,” and each time they’re left disappointed. The boy from Malia had been speaking to “Chia” every night on the phone for two months. He believed he was in love with her. I couldn’t help but feel for him—though I did find it odd his suspicions hadn’t been raised by the fact this cyber charlatan apparently had a family emergency to attend to literally every time they were due to meet.
Flynn and her group of friends are all together victims of Catfishing. All of their photos posted to the internet have been taken and used on fake profiles across various social networks. There are 60 profiles!
“Every photo we upload is re-posted to Facebook by our respective fake accounts; every job we start is updated on our profiles; every tweet is repeated,” she writes for VICE. “It’s so believable that I’ve genuinely considered whether or not there’s a parallel group of everyone I know (with slightly different second names) living somewhere in Halifax.”
For awhile, the girls thought it was kind of funny, assuming it would stop after the imposters got bored. But to the contrary, things actually got worse, more intricate, more frightening. Flynn recalls a time a man showed up to the girls’ college dorm demanding to meet “Chia,” which, of course, meant the Catfisher knew where the women lived.
Now that’s one dedicated identity thief!
source/photo: businessinsider.com
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