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---
layout: page
title: "Someone is Impersonating Me Online"
author: Floriana Pagano, Alexandra Hache
language: en
summary: "Someone is being impersonated through a social media account, email address, PGP key, fake website or app"
date: 2020-11
permalink: /en/topics/impersonated
parent: Home
---
# Someone is Impersonating Me Online
A threat faced by many activists, human rights defenders, NGOs, independent media, and bloggers is to be impersonated by adversaries that will create false profiles, websites, or emails in their names. This is meant sometimes to create smearing campaigns, misleading information, social engineering, or stealing one's identity in order to create noise, trust issues, and data breaches that impact the reputation of the individuals and collectives being impersonated. In other cases an adversary may impersonate someone's online identity for financial motivations such as raising funds, stealing payment credentials, receiving payments, etc.
This is a frustrating problem that can on different levels affect your capacity to communicate and inform. It can also have different causes depending on where and how you are being impersonated.
It is important to know that there are many ways to impersonate someone (fake profiles in social media, cloned websites, spoofed emails, non-consensual publication of personal images and videos). Strategies may range from submitting take-down notices, proving original ownership, claiming copyright of the original website or information, or warning your networks and personal contacts through public or confidential communications. Diagnosing the problem and finding possible solutions to impersonation can be complicated. Sometimes it will be close to impossible to push a small hosting company to take down a website, and legal action may become necessary. It is good practice to set up alerts and monitor the internet for finding out if you or your organization are being impersonated.
This section of the Digital First Aid Kit will walk you through some basic steps to diagnose potential ways of impersonating and potential mitigation strategies to remove accounts, websites and emails impersonating you or your organization.
If you are being impersonated, follow this questionnaire to identify the nature of your problem and find possible solutions.
## Workflow
### urgent-question
Do you fear for your physical integrity or wellbeing?
- [Yes](#physical-sec_end)
- [No](#diagnostic-start1)
### diagnostic-start1
Is the impersonation affecting you as an individual (someone is using your legal name and surname, or the nickname you base your reputation on) or as an organization/collective?
- [As an individual](#individual)
- [As an organization](#organization)
### individual
> If you are being affected as an individual, you might want to alert your contacts. Take this step using a mail account, profile or website that is fully under your control.
English Actions
### lost-PGP
- [Facebook](#facebook)
- [Twitter](#twitter)
- [Google+](#google+)
- [Instagram](#instagram)
# Someone is Impersonating Me Online
This section of the Digital First Aid Kit will walk you through some basic steps to diagnose potential ways of impersonating and potential mitigation strategies to remove accounts, websites and emails impersonating you or your organization.
### diagnostic-start1
- [As an individual](#individual)
- [As an organization](#organization)
- [A fake website is impersonating me or my group](#fake-website)
- [Through a social network account](#social-network)
- [Through non-consensual sharing of videos or images](#other-website)
- [Through my email address or a similar address](#spoofed-email1)
- [Through a PGP key connected to my email address](#PGP)
- [Through a fake app that is imitating my app](#app1)
On which social networking platform are you being impersonated?
> Follow the instructions in ["How do I report a Facebook account or Page that’s pretending to be me or someone else?"](https://www.facebook.com/help/174210519303259) for requesting the impersonating account to be deleted.
>
> Please note that it might take some time to receive an answer to your request. Save this page in your bookmarks and come back to this workflow in a few days.
- [Yes](#malicious-website)
- [No](#non-malicious-website)
> Report the URL to Google Safe Browsing by filling out the ["Report malicious software" form](https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/).
>
> Please note that it might take some time to make sure that your report was successful. Meanwhile you can proceed to the next step for sending a takedown request to the hosting provider and domain registrar, or save this page in your bookmarks and come back to this workflow in a few days.
Are you able to change your password?
- You can follow the ["I cannot access my account" workflow](../../../account-access-issues) to solve this issue.
> Email spoofing consists in email messages with a forged sender address. The message appears to have originated from someone or somewhere other than the actual source.
>
> Email spoofing is common in phishing and spam campaigns because people are more likely to open an email when they think it is coming from a legitimate source.
>
> If someone is spoofing your email, you should inform your contacts to warn them about the danger of phishing (do it from a mail account, profile or website that is fully under your control).
>
> If you think the impersonation was aimed at phishing or other malicious intents, you might also want to read the [I have received suspicious messages](../../../suspicious_messages) section.
Did the emails stop after you changed the password to your email account?
### PGP-compromised
Do you still have access to your private key?
- [Yes](#access-to-PGP)
- [No](#lost-PGP)
> - Create a new key pair and have it signed by people you trust.
> - Inform your contacts through a trusted channel you control, such as Signal or another [end-to-end encrypted tool](https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/resource-publication/guide-secure-group-chat-and-conferencing-tools), that they should use your new key and stop using the old one.
### PGP-spoofed
Would you like to file a takedown request to remove the impersonating content from the website?
### doxing-question
> If the malicious app is hosted on Google Play Store, follow the steps in ["Removing Content From Google"](https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905) for taking down content that violates copyright.
>
> It might take some time to wait for a response to your request. Save this page in your bookmarks and come back to this workflow in a few days.
### apple-store
> If the fake app hasn't been taken down, please contact the organizations below who can support you.
> If you need help or recommendations on phishing, email security and encryption, and secure communications in general, you can reach out to these organizations:
To prevent any further attempts at impersonating you, read the tips below.
- [Access Now Helpline Community Documentation: Choosing a password manager](https://communitydocs.accessnow.org/295-Password_managers.html)
- [Access Now: SMS-based two step authentication (2FA)](https://www.accessnow.org/need-talk-sms-based-two-step-authentication/)
- [Access Now Helpline Community Documentation: Guide to prevent doxing](https://guides.accessnow.org/self-doxing.html)
- [Archive.org: Archive your website](https://archive.org/web/)
- [Security Self-Defense: Create strong and unique passwords](https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/creating-strong-passwords)
- [Security Self-Defense: Animated Overview using password managers](https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/animated-overview-using-password-managers-stay-safe-online)
- [Security Self-Defense: How to use KeePassXC - a secure open source password manager](https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-keepassxc)
---
layout: page
title: "Someone is Impersonating Me Online"
author: Floriana Pagano, Alexandra Hache
language: en
summary: "Someone is being impersonated through a social media account, email address, PGP key, fake website or app"
date: 2020-11
permalink: /en/topics/impersonated
parent: Home
---
### hacked-account

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String updated in the repository

  1. Digital First Aid Kit
  2. topics/impersonated.md
  3. English
---
layout: page
title: "Someone is Impersonating Me Online"
author: Floriana Pagano, Alexandra Hache
language: en
summary: "Someone is being impersonated through a social media account, email address, PGP key, fake website or app"
date: 2020-11
permalink: /en/topics/impersonated
parent: Home
---
---
layout: page
title: "Someone is Impersonating Me Online"
author: Floriana Pagano, Alexandra Hache
language: en
summary: "Someone is being impersonated through a social media account, email address, PGP key, fake website or app"
date: 2020-11
permalink: /en/topics/impersonated
parent: Home
---
a year ago
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Translate the values to the following front matter variables only: title, summary, sidebar

Replace en in front matter variables language and permalink with your target language code, for example, id (Indonesian), fil (Filipino), my (Burmese), km (Khmer), th (Thai), etc

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Source string age
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content/en/topics/impersonated.md, string 1