Y'all ready for this story? Does this crazy shit only happen to me??  Anyone else??  So my team manages a handful of client social business accounts.  One of my team members went to post on a business account for an event and noticed someone new was following the event.  So as she normally does, she clicked the profile picture to welcome them.  To her surprise, every picture was ME and from MY account.  Someone named “Estelle Asllani” was pretending to be me on Instagram.  WTF???

And the most creepy part was the captions that this person put under MY pictures! And the captions under MY family and MY dogs; OMG it just freaks me out as I am dictating this out! LOL!  I mean the fact that one of my team members just stumbled upon this baffles my mind! She/he even made highlights from my highlights about traveling….world traveler…well, pre-COVID-19! But the real kicker is “Crypto Expert” with the dark hair emoji; ok, GSD peeps, I am blond and always have been, so that doesn't add up.

The definition of an impostor is a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain. They key word here being FRAUD….My identity has been completely stolen several years ago (it's made me alot smarter); and when your business name IS your name; it can FU*K up alot of shit! Like my credit, my ability to ship stuff out of the country, stuff that you can't even imagine! So after spending thousands of dollars, hiring an attorney and post therapy, I did everything I could to NEVER have this happen again.

Tip: Don't use the same password for everything.  Get an encryption APP like 1Password or LastPass.  Do NOT rely on Google or Keychain to keep up with your confidential user names and passwords; just trust me on this. Just DO NOT do it.

Now before I over reacted and got my brother involved (who owns a PI company) or my attorney involved (I mean this is my brand of almost two decades) my team member simply contacted the account via DM and told them to immediately take it down. And said some other things.  And within a few hours the account was deleted.  Now I won't even mention where my head was going if they had not deleted it ASAP.  Or what were they plotting to do?  Steal my identity….hack my business account….please God, not again.  That is one of the most stressful things ever.  So glad that it ended, but the point of me sharing this is to encourage you to watch what you are putting online AND secure your identify and your passwords!

If you have any experience shares on preventing fraud all together; please share with us!  That Is how we can learn from each other!