It is an exhausting experience alright. One thing that struck me was, as you alluded to, how few people seemed to understand the magnitude of the problem. Some seemed to think of this as an annoyance or an inconvenience rather than what it really was: identity theft… a serious problem.

With someone using my face, linking to my blog, using a Twitter background identical to mine, and using a Twitter name just one letter off from mine… and with that person exchanging tweets with my own Twitter contacts, it was more serious than some momentary confusion. There were people who had “followed” me on Twitter for over a year and exchanged tweets with me daily that were still confused weeks after my account was “cloned”.

People made suggestions to me such as, “why don’t you change your Twitter background?” They thought that by changing the appearance of my background to something different than what the impostor used to copy me that it would help somehow.

The thing is:

1) The impostor would have just copied whatever I did anyway to make the backgrounds match. (I knew this because the impostor was already copying other things I was doing).

2) If I changed my background and the impostor surprised me by NOT changing the background of the impostor account, then the image my Twitter contacts were familiar with normally seeing on my account would be showing on the impostor’s and my real account would look different than usual. This would only add to the confusion over which account was which.

Maddeningly, people were even sending out FollowFriday suggestions and retweets that were promoting my blog posts and they were (unknowingly) crediting my work to the impostor. These people truly thought they were promoting my work but they were listing the impostor’s account in the tweets with URLs linking back to this blog.

All of these were problematic but they were nothing compared to other problems (that I don’t even care to go into). The point is that people need to be made aware that identity theft is identity theft.

Stealing someone’s reputation isn’t viewed by some as to be as serious as, say, hacking into someone’s bank account and stealing their money. I would argue that it’s just as serious, if not more so. Much went on behind the scenes the last few weeks I was on Twitter… not all of it necessarily related to the impostor situation. Some of it I am not comfortable talking about publicly. I will say, however, that anyone who doesn’t take online identity theft (and Internet security) seriously chooses this behavior at his/her own peril.

Jeanne

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It wasn’t fun.

Jeanne

It was all very stressful. Identity theft is serious. I will never know for sure why this person did this. It could happen to anyone.

Jeanne