When Someone Is Pretending to Be You

Someone sends you a link and it is you. Your photographs, a name a letter different from yours, and a shop taking money from people who think they are dealing with you. It is unpleasant in a way that is hard to describe to anyone who has not had it, and the first hour is usually spent doing nothing useful.

Do the collecting first, before anything else. Screenshot the profile, the listings, the handle and the date, and save the images somewhere that is not only your phone. Fake accounts get deleted and rebuilt, and if you report one without evidence you are starting from nothing when it reappears next month.

Then report it to the platform it sits on, once, properly, using their impersonation process rather than a general complaint. Give the account, your own account, and the specific images being used. Platforms are slow, and a report with everything attached is the only version that moves at all.

Do not message the account yourself. It achieves nothing, it tells them which of their listings you have found, and it occasionally produces a fight that ends up somewhere your buyers can see. Tempting, and consistently counterproductive.

The part that actually matters is your own people. Post once, plainly, saying there is an account using your images, giving your real handles, and saying where you do and do not sell. No drama needed. The real harm from impersonation is almost never the fake shop. It is a buyer who paid it, got nothing, and now believes you took their money, and that person will not usually come and ask you about it. They will simply be gone.

Afterwards, make yourself harder to copy. Consistent handles across everything, a list on your profile of every place you actually sell, and buyers who know to check that list before paying anybody.