My 15 year old sister informed me last night that someone is pretending to be her on Instagram. The impersonator uses her photo as their profile picture and uploaded insta stories and photos of her with penises drawn on her face. This is probably the work of an teenager who dislikes her.
This person also contacts her friends through messaging service and harrasses them.
Instagram had declined her request to shut the account down on multiple occasions. I have tried to contact several grey hats online to locate and identify the impersonator but we’re finding out that such service isn’t cheap at all.
What should we do in this case? Thanks in advance.
EDIT: 30/9/23 Thank you for all of your advice and recommendations. We took screenshots and made a report on Netsafe’s website They scheduled a phone call with her where she was able to explain what happened.
The bully account was finally taken down and Netsafe had 100% to do with it. They sent my sister a text message with updates on the case.
We think we know who the culprit is. They’re a group of boys from a school in South Auckland. All of them covers their faces when posting on Instagram, we think we know why.
Anyways, I’ve made sure that my sister is keeping herself safe when online especially when it comes to posting photos.
Thanks again everyone.
Report it to the Police 105 team and NetSafe. This is basically cyberbullying and could even be seen as child exploitation, which is a crime.
Check this page for more info: https://www.police.govt.nz/advice-services/cybercrime-and-internet/online-child-safety
We’ve done this and the account was later taken down with Netsafe’s involvement. Thank you!
That’s great to hear, really happy for you guys that it worked out! :)
I would also report this to the girl’s school. It’s cyber bullying and they will want to know.
Go to the news, nothing makes a company like this change their tune than bad press.
Given how Meta have been doing for the last few years “we refused to shut down an account that is cyber bullying a minor” just about qualifies as good news
This is probably the work of an teenager who dislikes her.
Or it’s not. You simply don’t know who is doing this.
I can only speak in context of laws here in the US, but impersonation with the intent to cause reputational harm is absolutely illegal. NZ seems like they would have similar laws in place.
Save screenshots of everything you find and record the time and exact URL of offending content.
Get an attorney and they may help you navigate the legal system where you are. I suspect this is outside the jurisdiction of local law enforcement and would need to be reported to the equivalent of the FBI that we have here. Maybe your local police have a way to escalate this? Regardless, this is sticky because you have someone, probably in your country, using a service from the USA.
This is a royal pain, but you need to unleash absolute hell on this person to set a very clear example. If your lawyer allows, contact the press and see if you can have a very public story ran about this problem. Instagram needs to catch a bit of shit over this as well.
Fuck people who do this kind of thing.
You can probably see if some local authorities can get involved, especially since the penises on face thing can count as sexual content involving a minor
Don’t waste money on grey hat services just ignore it. No one thinks your sister is making posts with dicks drawn on her face. The person will get bored in a few days if you don’t give them any attention.
Find Instagram workers on LinkedIn and message them.
Contact news outlets and give them the story. It’s outrage bait and they will want to carry it.
See if you can glean any meta-data from the pictures on Insta (unlikely but maybe)
Pretend to be someone else, play along, gain their trust, exact revenge.
Make a post informing her followers about her impersonator and then move on. Let the impersonator allow your sister live rent free in their head.
Unfortunately, teenagers are very easy to convince to groupthink, and an individual teenage bully can often be as smart as a conniving aristocrat when it comes to online drama.
This is absolutely something that could ruin the girl’s life, if only because teenagers and tween girls are disproportionately tribalist in their outlook.
