My Identity theft on the Internet that led to suicide and a 1.5 billion dollar lawsuit against match.com
From 2003 until now I've been posting pictures and videos online showing my exciting traveling and modeling experiences. One day in 2004 my older sister called me and asked what I was doing on yahoo personals. I told her I never opened Yahoo profile. That's when I realized that scammers were stealing my images to use on dating sites, they would create fake profiles with my images.
Even to this day they are still all over Facebook. I had a website where I posted all my pictures and I had a fan-base, so my fans would tell me about all the fake profiles. Then one of the biggest websites of romance scammers told ABC 20/20 that a man committed suicide after realizing that he sent $50,000 over a period of a year to a scammer from Ghana. They were using my images to scam him. He went into debt and felt ashamed then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
ABC 20/20 did a story, first they came to see me in Florida, then later flew me to New York City, put me in a hotel, plus my own driver to take me to the ABC Studios. I did the interview with Chris Cuomo, and I did not know the full story. I just knew that scammers where stealing my images online. In the middle of the interview Chris tells me what if I told you a man suicide himself by a scammer using your pictures. I was shocked and very sad and of course, that's why they didn't want to tell me what the interview was going to be about, they wanted a reaction for the cameras. That's how I learned about the damage that the scammers were doing to innocent victims and how easily men were getting fooled by the scammers stealing my images.
In 2013 a lawyer from a prominent law firm contacted me about filling a lawsuit, he found over 200 fake profiles on match.com. He filled a 1.5 billion dollar lawsuit against them for making profits off my images. There was allot of news media about the lawsuit, like the New York Post, Huffington Post, and even The Young Turks, but of course match.com has 50 lawyers. It's a shame how they can easily detect the face of an image by software, but they want to do their own scam by charging monthly memberships for their members to find "love".
Don't be fooled by a picture of a pretty woman or a handsome man, always tell them to show themselves on videos. I my opinion, video is the best proof of identity online. I enjoy steemit.com, and I prefer to post videos of myself to keep it real.
Smart way of verifying your identity with the youtube video to match. Kudos. I think that is totally amazing, and I think that single thing is worth a million bucks on steemit for that..
(Slight exaggeration, but it came out that way. Ha ha)
My god, that's an awful story, I'm glad that it really is you on here, like you say there have been some suspicious accounts on here.
Anyway, welcome to Steemit :-)
CG
Holy crap, I want to know more about your life!
Thats pretty crazy and sad for the dude that fell in love
Wow! Have heard a lot of stories about ID theft but I wasn't prepared for this!
Glad to have you here https://steemit.com/steem/@arcaneinfo/my-new-voting-power-and-influencing-new-steemers-to-the-community
Happy Steeming!!!
That is just an insane story Yuliana it sounds like you had to put up with a lot of crap but I think the whole world can see you're a real person, and a smart and beautiful one at that! Just keep your head held high and keep on Steeming!
Why dont we all just post our ID's, if it comes to this.
Ahh I knew this was coming! The next evolution in the indroduceyourself section, when a picture and a paper with steemit and the date Isn't quite enough. A video!
Very engaging, you saw where to add value and stand out in the face of increasing competition :)
Pretty crazy story, I'd be interested to read what comes next.
Well, you had a point in that video, and now you just made it completely impossible to ignore it. Saying you know what you are talking about would be an understatement. Can you join the slack? I think your input could be useful to help shape the design of Steemit's reputation system, and it will be good to have someone with such a compelling cautionary tale to help democratizing that form of authentication.
My recommendation would be before joining Steemit show your face WebCam or video
It's a blockchain so we can't force anyone doing anything, but it's fair game to make it a rule of thumb that best payouts should be reserved for posters who made the most effort authenticating themselves as this is something (actually the only thing) that we do control.
Sounds great