Influencer victim of an Instagram impersonation epidemic

In January 2022, Valentina Gomez, an influencer dedicated to wellness topics on Instagram, received alert messages from several friends. She was told that someone had created an account with her name and photos. It wasn't a classic case of impersonation: the stories and bio had links where supposedly sexual content of her could be found.

This is a modality that is becoming increasingly common on Instagram. Since 2020, cases have been reported of the creation of fake accounts that use photographs of young women to direct users to pages where it is claimed that the sexual content of the impersonated person is found, but which are nothing more than facades to defraud or steal data.

In Valentina's case, the fake account differed from the real one only by one letter. When searching for that profile, she realized that she had been blocked and asked her followers -about fourteen thousand- to report her. In addition, she filled out and submitted an Instagram form available for cases of impersonation.

The links posted on Valentina's fake account appeared to be from Admire Me, a subscription-based content platform. This, as well as OnlyFans or Just For Fans, are often used as bait in this kind of fraud. As indicated by the organization R3D -which last year warned of the arrival of this form of impersonation in Mexico-, many times users are actually directed to pages designed in Wix. On this platform, as on other web development platforms, it is possible to report pages with abusive content.

According to Instagram, only requests submitted by the impersonated person or a representative receive a response from them. A few days after submitting the form, Valentina received an email from Meta informing her that her case could not be reviewed, as the pandemic had forced the platform to prioritize the most urgent cases. This same argument has also been used by Meta in their transparency reports to indicate that they cannot offer all users the possibility to appeal moderation decisions.

Faced with this response, Valentina went to a lawyer to try to solve the problem by legal means. Through a right of petition, she asked Facebook Colombia to remove the account that was impersonating her, but the company responded that the management of Instagram was in the hands of the parent company, so she would have to send her request directly to Menlo Park, California. They invited, in any case, to follow the channels established by the platform to report accounts. 

The next step was to file a tutela, an action that in Colombia allows to defend fundamental rights in a much faster way than in ordinary channels. Shortly after a judge admitted the tutela, the page impersonating Valentina disappeared from Instagram, without her being notified of the measure. It is unclear whether the court action influenced that outcome.

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