What happens when they clone your digital identity?

• Cyber harassment and cyber bullying:

  A common type of cyber fraud involves the impersonation of a targeted victim. It can sometimes involve hijacking someone’s account, but often it merely involves the creation of a dummy account with a victim’s pictures and content. The account is run by a perpetrator who makes the victim look bad through the account’s egregious behavior. When the creator of the dummy account acts bombastically – leaving rude comments on the walls of friends and family or posting disturbing content – the victim’s reputation loss is alarming.

• Fraud and scams:

  In order to create more convincing scams, some fraudsters pose as real people or use aspects of a real person’s likeness (e.g., a genuine photo with a made-up name) to dupe others online. Online account frauds are becoming more sophisticated with schemes using additional personal information to enhance the believability of the scam, assuming the scammer doesn’t just wholesale hijack a target’s account. Should your identity be used in one of these scams, it could suggest that your online accounts privacy and security are far negligent than you would want. It could also tie your identity to that of the scammer’s in the minds of their victims, an association you would not want.

• Mass identity harvesting schemes:

  Over the past few years, the presence of automated dummy social media accounts, often referred to as bots, has exploded. Bots are pieces of code designed to do repetitive tasks that humans can do themselves but wish to automate. In the context of social media and online dating, bots can imitate users by carrying out basic functions (liking or retweeting content or posting messages) that make them appear human. To enhance a bot’s perceived realism, some creators steal people’s names and digital identities and assign these details to their bots.