Someone took my identity

Emma, 15, had someone pinch her identity online. She emailed us her story...

Emma's story

One day at school my friend Kirsty convinced me to sign up to a social networking site, so I did. It was great at the start because I got loads of people adding me - more than 500! I was so pleased that I was popular on the internet.

Me and my mates always liked to take pictures when we went out. We loved to pose, pout and wear lots of make-up. We'd always put them up on our profile pages and think nothing of it.

I used to get loads of comments like: "You're so gorgeous x" and "you're well pretty". I'd set my profile so everyone could see it and I got even more adds.

“I was so shocked ”

Disturbing discovery

But everything changed when one day I was looking at a friends page and I saw a comment that made me stop in my tracks. It was a picture of me, and the comment read: "It was well good last night babes x"

I didn't remember writing that, so I clicked on the profile and up came a site with someone pretending to be me! I was so shocked, the profile said stuff like "come and get me boys" and loads of other rude stuff

Needed answers

I sent the person a message asking them what the hell they were doing. But they didn't reply. I visited that website every day, and every time I put a new picture up, they put the same one.

At first I was so scared and didn't know what to do. But then I decided to set my profile to private, and to delete everyone I didn't know from my friends list.

I told my mum about it, and she told me to delete my profile altogether, which I did. When I told my friends, they were really shocked too. One of my friends told me that someone had been sending her weird messages under my name which scared me even more.

Glad it's over

I don't know who tried to steal my identity, but I'm sure it was someone who had nothing better to do. I think it's such a low thing to do and it really freaked me out.

I've made a new profile page now, but it is set to private and I do not accept friend requests from anyone I don't know. I was stupid and I will never do it again.