Articles
From The Sunday Times
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August 24, 2008
Facebook fakers unmasked
Simone Lahib and other celebrities are finding their identities are being swiped by imposters using fake profiles
Richard Wilson
When Simone Lahbib came face to face with herself on Facebook, the social networking website, she was horrified by what she found.
The page in her name contained some of the actress’s personal details, but also photographs of her that friends had posted. The site, set up by an imposter, was realistic enough to fool even those who know her well. “I don’t even know how to describe how I feel,” she says, “but I feel worse for the people who were tricked into thinking they were communicating with me.”
Having developed a large cult following of fans from her role as a bisexual prison officer in Bad Girls, Lahbib understands the nature of celebrity and the scrutiny that results from it. Yet she remains shaken by the vulnerability she felt.
Unknown to her, somebody had reached into her social circle, immersing themselves in her life. When she learnt of the imposter and the potential harm they could have wrought, she shuddered, chilled by the fear of what might have been.
“I became more and more troubled about it,” she admits. “This person got in touch with my friends. They were saying to me this person found them on Facebook and added them as friends. It’s that thing of not knowing what was said, how they conducted themselves, just people believing it. It’s very distasteful and I’m very angry about it. I can get in touch with my friends and say I’m really sorry about it, but I can’t to other people. I dealt with it as soon as I could and I hope they don’t feel silly or foolish, or anything worse.”
Despite sending e-mails to Facebook complaining about the fake profile, it took Lahbib several weeks to get it removed, during which time she worried friends might be fooled into meeting up with the person posing as her.
Even now, she feels that the site did not react swiftly enough to deal with the situation, and she still does not know the identity of her imposter. “I’d love to think that Facebook could find that out and that they would be interested enough to do it, that there would be some kind of recourse for it,” she adds. “Surely that’s a type of fraud?”
It is the ease with which a fake profile can be created that is telling. So, too, is the difficulty for the website to establish which is a real identity and which is fabricated. The freedoms of the internet are also its vulnerabilities and the accessibility of Facebook creates a breeding ground for the growing obsession with celebrity. On the internet, fantasy and real life can merge.
“I have had about 99% really good experiences with fans,” says Lahbib. “You wouldn’t believe how lovely people can be: presents, people remembering your birthday with cards, or remembering Skye’s [her daughter] birthday, just the loveliest gestures. I’ve had less than a handful of bad experiences and usually it’s just over-zealous fans getting carried away, finding a contact for me or that kind of thing and in the end there was nothing sinister in it.
“I’m hoping this fake Facebook site turns out to be another case of that. I also hope that nobody out there experienced anything bad from this, but how would I know?”
Shabana Bakhsh, another Scottish actress, was the victim of a similar fraud, when somebody stole her identity to set up a Facebook page then used it to chat to cast and crew members of Waterloo Road, the BBC drama series she stars in. The imposter was told of forthcoming storylines for the programme, and even arranged a date for coffee with one of Bakhsh’s colleagues, before the deception was uncovered.
Hardeep Singh Kohli, a comedian and broadcaster, also discovered a fake Facebook site set up in his identity when he searched for people who shared his name. “I found a photo of me and looked a bit further into it and realised somebody had gone to a great deal of effort to make it look like they were me,” he says.
Facebook is an internet phenomenon. Since being created more than four years ago by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students, it has attracted 67m active users to become the second-most-trafficked social media site in the world. Mostly used as a way to keep in touch with family, friends and work colleagues, social groups and networks also rapidly developed. Yet it has proved to be open to abuse.
When Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was named as chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party last December after the assassination of his mother, Benazir, a prankster set up a fake Facebook site in the 19-year-old’s name. Newspaper reporters seeking information about Zardari were fooled into thinking the site was real and published data lifted from the profile page.
Alex Curran, the wife of Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard and prominent Wag, was also the victim of a fake Facebook site, as was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s former wife.
What is common to the deception is the ease with which people can be fooled, using basic knowledge such as date and place of birth and photographs that can easily be found on the internet. In the US, lawyers are even beginning to specialise in online reputation management.
For celebrities, fake sites are often the work of over-zealous fans or pranksters, but a sinister edge can creep in. A businessman, Mathew Firsht, was awarded £22,000 compensation last month after an old friend created a fake Facebook site and posted false claims about his sexuality, political views and debts.
Like Lahbib, Singh Kohli found the website sluggish in dealing with the fake site set up in his name. Having grown tired of sending e-mails and receiving no response, he established his own group on the site, called Get Rid of the Facebook Imposter.
“Facebook ignored every request. You send them an e-mail saying, ‘This is going on, can you sort it out?’, and you don’t get a response. Nothing gets done,” he says.
As friends continued to join the fake site and it began to affect his working life, Singh Kohli became more aware of the perils of having his identity stolen.
“I’d deputised for Mark Kermode doing movie reviews on Radio 5 Live and I hadn’t heard anything back from the producer,” he says.
“I was a bit miffed, because when you don’t hear anything you assume you’ve done a bad job, but the producer had been posting on the imposter’s site, saying how happy he was and how he’d like to do it again and to get in touch.
“There was also a worry that somebody might behave inappropriately in a personal context. As it turned out, he was just an unemployed bloke in west London who liked my work and thought it would be good fun. He hadn’t thought it through, but he wasn’t a nasty man at all.”
Facebook defends its practices, pointing to the inherent difficulties of regulating user-led content on the internet. “Facebook is based on a real-name culture and will remove fake profiles for violating its terms of use,” a spokesperson said.
“Before we do so, we examine a range of criteria to determine whether a profile is authentic, including reports from users, profile content, the e-mail associated with an account, length of time the account has been open and network affiliations. As soon as we are made aware of a possible fake profile, our user investigations team examine it immediately and remove it from the site.”
The concern for Singh Kohli and others is what could have happened.