In 2011, I was almost brutally murdered by a man who was involved in an online relationship with someone who had created a fake profile using my stolen pictures. At the time when he traveled to my home in California from his home in Michigan, I had been dealing with people impersonating me online for over four years. I had gone to the local police as well as the CATCH (Computer and Technology Crime High-Tech Response) Team and was repeatedly told that there was legally nothing that I could do to stop the impersonators. After he came to my home to murder me when he found out the person he was in a "relationship" with was not really the person in the pictures, I thought law enforcement would take my situation more seriously and I would finally be able to bring an end to the impersonations. Unfortunately, that did not happen. The man who tried to kill me is now out of prison (living only 2 hours away from me) and I am still fighting to have these pages removed without any success thus far. You can read my full story at tiffanywatkins.org if interested.

If you have social media, have ever shared your pictures with anyone else online, or have used online photo storage, you are at risk of becoming a victim of online impersonation. Your pictures can be stolen and used for any purpose that the person who steals them desires.

This means that the person who steals your pictures can create a false persona using your images. They can then assume your identity to the point that in real life people think that you are them. Having your images stolen is a nightmare in which you are completely helpless. You have no control over what is being said and done by the person hiding behind your image, but you do have to face the consequences. 

Most websites for these accounts (such as Facebook, OkCupid, Twitter, etc.) will completely disregard any complaints that you make to have these pages removed saying that it does not violate their rules. This is because there are laws in place that protect the websites themselves from having any liability for the actions taken by the users of their websites. So, there are laws protecting the websites but there are not any laws protecting the people using the sites.

Online impersonation through the use of someone else's image needs to be a felony at the federal level. There are currently laws in some states with punishments of varying degrees. For example, in California, there is a law that makes online impersonation a misdemeanor and also makes it possible to take civil action against the person. However, this law, as well as the laws in the other states, are nearly pointless. Since it is a crime occurring online, it falls under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of investigation. So there is a separation: the federal government is responsible for investigating and implementing something that falls under a state law. The federal jurisdiction will not do anything since the crime is not against federal law, and the state and local jurisdictions are not capable of an online investigation.

Complicated and confusing, right? It needs to be simple and to the point: online impersonation using another person's image needs to be a felony at the federal level.

As for the states that make it able to take a civil action against someone, this is not possible for most people. After speaking with various lawyers, just to have a lawyer find out who the perpetrator is would cost somewhere around $10,000. Then, you would have the court case, which could last years and average at about $5k-10k per month. This is not something that most people can afford, so that part of the law is also pointless (unless you are a celebrity or a millionaire).  

Online impersonation, commonly known as "catfishing" is a growing problem and the number of lives being affected by it are growing every day. I have had numerous people reach out to me and share their stories of how someone stealing their pictures is severely affecting their lives. I have also had many people reaching out to me to tell me how they were catfished by someone, and how they invested years of their lives into relationships only to find out that the person they were talking to never really existed. I am not alone in the suffering I have endured and continue to endure due to online impersonation, please help me to stop this growing problem before it affects even more lives.