About catfishing people / Fake profiles / Scammers

mareen:

In the past years, I have received a lot of emails and messages about others using mine or my sister Vivien’s photographs to catfish innocent internet users.

Their names were Kourtney Walsh (she was used to make a company look bigger, worked as a consultant and had a whole life as well), Fallon River Clark (Facebook won’t shut her down), Lena Mischke (fictional wife of an actual person, Aaron Mischke-Pearce who does exsist and lives and works in Munich now!), Benny / River Maddox (see comments), some Ashley and many more whose names I have already forgotten.

One of them was a cancer doctor and collected PayPal donations of people willing to help, others just broke hearts, received gifts from their lovers, met up with “a sent friend because the other person is in the hospital”, other ones threatened to hurt the family of the fooled ones if they spoke out to the public or police.

This happened to people in Mexico, the U.S., Germany, England, and many more – and these are just the ones who found out AND told me.

One time, in 2010, my sister’s real profile and all her connections got deleted permanently after I had told Facebook that the fake character Maureen Fishinger was using her photo. Facebook is not responding ever, they simply don’t care about their mistakes or if they can’t see how something is wrong at first glance.

So far so ~~good~~ bad.

I am not even diving deep here – I haven’t spent more time on the topic than hearing about it and maybe trying to tell facebook or whoever runs the sites.
There is probably much more about it. You may have more stories, and if you haven’t yet spoken out, go ahead and email me (don’t worry, you may use your real name before me).

Four simple rules:

1) Please, never fall for anyone on the internet. Don’t tell them about your personal life in order to avoid making yourself vulnerable. 20% of Facebook profiles are fake.

2) If you see a story wrapped around images, do Google’s reverse image search (click the camera symbol).

3) Don’t forget to make lots of screenshots.

4) Also, please, let the people know you have found out AFTER you have reported them!

Love, Mareen

PS.: I have been sent a couple more fake profiles after I wrote this post. Here are some, they are still online. As long as you are not friends with them, you won’t see a story. Maybe confront them: Summer Cosgrove, Susan Caraway, Steffi M.

This is insane, scary and terrible.