For the past year and a half a woman or man from Manchester, England has been pretending to be me. I can only assume that this person found this blog, and from there, my flickr account (the slideshow in the sidebar). She then systematically imitated my life on several message boards, Facebook, MySpace, Vimeo, and Photobucket.
Through the blog she was able to tell a pretty convincing story (as she used no imagination-- I mean, it's the internet--she could've claimed she was a rich lawyer from New York-- but no, she chose to be named Kitty, from Wisconsin, with a girl named Josie and a baby boy on the way.) She used my life, but one year back. So, in her message boards and Facebooks, Josie is 18 months old, and she's pregnant. She got my age wrong (I haven't been 21 for a long time) and other identifying information wrong (the order of my siblings, the schools I attended, the timeline of my relationship with Eric, etc.) but she told a convincing enough story that many people believed her, for a year and a half.
She created fake Myspace and Facebook pages of my sisters to add to the authenticity of her scheme. They would comment on her pages, making her false pages about my life more believable. These have all been reported and some removed.
It's mostly harmless (yet horrifying!)-- the information I have that's public on this blog is carefully chosen because I know anyone can see it. I don't think the person in England has any ill intent-- I really think s/he was bored all that time ago, thought of a plan, and then got lost in it. Still, I've made the decision to privatize all my flickr pictures and videos.
If you still want to see them, I am going to have to add you as a contact. The easiest way to do this is to make a free flickr account at yahoo.com and then visit my flickr site and request to add me as a contact. I understand that this is many more hoops to jump through than I would've originally liked, so I'm sorry.
I can only assume my impersonator is reading this now. If you are, congratulations on creeping out a perfectly unassuming family from across the pond.
We'll still update this blog with our mundane life, and we appreciate all your support.
3 comments:
Wow, that's unbelievable! How did you find out about it?
This is crazy!! How did you discover it?
In short, a woman who knew the fake me was browsing a flickr group, recognized a photo of Josie, followed it to my flickr account. She then realized that the 18 month old she had watched grow up was actually 2.5 and the baby the fake me was expecting... was here, a boy, and was 6 months old!!
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