'They were putting up photos of girls nude from the neck down, insinuating it was me'

• Published date: 17 April 2021

Alicia O'Sullivan woke up last Thursday week to more than 100 messages on her phone. They were from "friends, family and followers on Instagram, people I hadn't spoken to in years". Immediately, "there was a feeling of anxiety and distress in the pit of my stomach. And then when the screenshots started to come in, it went from bad to horrific."

"I hate to be the bearer of bad news Alicia, but it looks like someone's after making a fake account about you," one of the messages read.

Somebody, she discovered, had taken her photos from Instagram and created a new Instagram account in her name without her permission. But it was worse than that. "On top of my posting my own photos, they were putting up photos of girls nude from the neck down, so you weren't able to see the face. And the insinuation was they were my photos, which they weren't. The illicit photos weren't mine." Some of the photos had a caption "saying 'join me, subscribe to my account' with a link to an adult content account.

Under one photograph of a semi-naked woman whose face is not visible, the caption reads, "Are you ready for me tonight? Watch out to my AdmiremeVIP page for my surprise content." Admireme.vip is an 18+ subscription-only website, which describes itself as "a platform for VIPs to share their most intimate and secret content".

O'Sullivan (19), a law student at UCC, immediately made an application to Instagram to have the page taken down on the grounds that someone was impersonating her. It was gone by the end of the day, which she believes is not always the case, and she got her own page back 48 hours later. She posted about her experience on Twitter and her genuine Instagram account, and when she heard from a number of other young women who had had similar experiences, she decided to report it to the Garda.

"There seems to be a targeting of young women to try and sell whatever they're trying to sell," she says. She decided to make a complaint, "just so it's been noted. I'm a rational person and understood there may be nothing they can do."

But the response she received from the gardaí she initially spoke to compounded what was already a distressing situation.

"To say the experience was horrific is an unjust understatement. The conversation wasn't about the account. [The guards] didn't ask to see the pictures of the account, they didn't ask the username on the account, they asked nothing about details of what was in the pictures. The conversation was more about me, my person...