So has your Instagram grid been cloned yet?

Cases of social media identity theft have skyrocketed in recent weeks, with victims’ loved ones being scammed so are any of us really safe online? Katie Strick reports

FRANCESCA HENRY felt like she was in an episode of Black Mirror or BBC cyber drama The Capture, watching some-one claiming to be her peddling crypto scams on Instagram and being unable to stop them. The personal finance expert, 33, had been running her Instagram account The Money Fox (@ the.moneyfox) for two years when one of her 36,000 followers first alerted her to the copycat account. Investigating, she was shocked to discover an almost-perfect replica of the Instagram profile she had put so much time into building: her name, her picture, each of her 300 or so posts, perfectly cloned from the videos to the captions. The only difference — a slightly altered Instagram handle, @the_moneyfox1, and plugs for a new cryptocurrency scheme hidden among her posts.

“I felt violated,” says Henry of the first time she discovered her Instagram had been cloned, almost two years ago. But it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. In the two years since, she has received almost-daily messages about as many as eight clone accounts at a time — many of them trying to scam her followers into sending them money.

“I’ve tried reporting them and writing ‘this is my only account’ in my real Instagram bio, but [the cloners] copy that as well, so it’s pointless,” she says. “The thought of someone literally sitting there screen-recording my Stories is horrifying, and it really upsets me to think that people might fall victim to fraud because someone is copying my account. It’s made me think about giving up on Instagram altogether.”