Another Matthew Dicks

Someone began impersonating me on Instagram yesterday, reaching out to followers to ask for money.

Pretty annoying.

I’ve since had the fake account deleted after jumping through a few Instagram hoops, but it wasn’t amusing. It stole away time and a little bit of my sense of security.

I was also oddly disappointed in my impersonator. Of all the ways they could spend their time, this was the most fruitful? Wasn’t there something more positive and productive that might produce better long term results than this?

I’m known for setting high expectations for everyone around me, but apparently this sometimes unfortunate tendency extends to my antagonists as well.

I told my students that someone was impersonating my IG account. One of them replied, “Why? You’re not worth impersonating.”

Another said, “Only famous and successful people get impersonated like that. This hacker must be really dumb.”

Another said, “You have an IG account? Why? What could anyone want to see from you?”

A colleague texted me a screenshot of the impersonator’s account, explaining that he knew the account wasn’t real because “There was no way you would ever ask, ‘How are you doing?’ to me.”

Forget the period in the middle of my first name or the lack of punctuation in the message. It was the demonstration of a simple, social norm that raised a red flag for him.

Another friend said, “It’s weird that someone would waste their time on you.”

A friend in Australia wrote: “How do you know you’re famous? Perhaps it’s when some inauthentic player pretends to be you online.”

This was the only kind thing said all day about the incident, but it was immediately followed by an email from a friend in the United States that read:

“Someone has hacked your IG and is trying to get people to send you money, not knowing that I don’t like you enough to ever send you money.”

Turns out you can discover what people really think about you just by getting hacked online.