They say talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.
If so, then talking to someone pretending to be you is even madder. But I’ve got a very good reason for doing so.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been speaking to someone posing as me on a messaging and social media app called Telegram.
It’s one of the most popular of its kind, with over a billion users worldwide. It’s well known for its looser moderation and mass ‘channels’ which you can follow for news and tips on all kinds of subjects.
It’s also become a notorious breeding ground for fraud.
Criminals take advantage of the app’s anonymity and the ability to reach thousands of users at a time, using AI bots to spread scams quickly and disappear before they can be shut down. Many are trying to win trust by impersonating celebrities, companies, and trusted ‘experts’ in their field.
Including, as it turns out, me.
I was first alerted to Fake Iona by an acquaintance who had been contacted by them and wanted to confirm with me it was genuine.
When I checked them out, I wasn’t impressed. They got my first name wrong, calling me Lona Bain, and had simply nicked a photo off Instagram and some of my biography as a personal finance expert.
Talk about low effort!
But it was creepy to see my identity hijacked – and alarming to think others might be duped.
So I reported it.
I emailed Telegram, using its ‘Report Impersonation’ channel, and waited. Weeks passed and nothing happened.
That’s when I decided to go undercover. I created a dummy profile and messaged Fake Iona directly, feigning interest in her expertise.
Fake Iona veered between short, clumsy sentences and articulate AI-generated paragraphs cajoling me to invest in cryptocurrency.
She sent me a link to a firm claiming to offer a ‘wide array of investment opportunities’ in cryptocurrency. But after researching them further, I noticed the outfit had a suspiciously limited online footprint and vague detail about how it works.
The alarm bells were deafening.
On the website, I found a badly-written prospectus with a bogus incorporation certificate, despite having no listing on Companies House, and references to untraceable awards.
The senior management team did not have any online presence outside the website, and its office claims to be headquartered at an address in southwest London, but the only business located there is a plush wine bar.
Either they like to mix their crypto with their chianti, or none of this was legitimate.
Nonetheless, Fake Iona was persistent and sent me a testimonial video of a random woman I’m calling Diane, gushing about the $15,000 she had made using the firm’s services.
She didn’t mention me by name, which suggested the clip had been recycled from another scam.
All in all, this exchange went on for several weeks until I confronted Fake Iona, telling her I was the real deal, and the person she was pretending to be. I expected her to disappear but instead, she doubled down, accusing me of being the imposter.
In a surreal exchange, I pointed out my name was spelt wrong on her profile. It was Lona instead of Iona.
Back came the reply: ‘Oh give me a break, ‘Iona with an I’. You can type whatever you want, it doesn’t make you the real deal.’ Being accused of being fake by someone impersonating me felt like the last straw!
Eventually, a few months after our initial interaction, the account vanished, but only because the scammer deleted it. Telegram never acted on my reports, nor did it respond to my repeated requests for comment. I got my @ionajbain handle back, but it was no thanks to the company.
This isn’t just my problem.
An academic study of more than 120,000 public channels has found widespread fake and cloned accounts mimicking influencers, crypto firms and even group admins to push scams.
And during all this, victims have lost millions.
Telegram may have added verification badges and reporting tools to try and stop the rot but researchers say the fakes keep thriving because enforcement is patchy and takedowns slow.
But it’s not confined to Telegram.
Impersonation fraud has become systemic across social media. Criminals now have AI on their side: bots that create endless fake profiles, produce slick marketing pitches, churn out deepfake videos and replicate the markers of respectability used by genuine influencers.
For ordinary users, it makes it harder than ever to know who they can really trust online.
My brush with Fake Iona was ultimately comical, but the experience highlights a wider truth: social media firms don’t do enough to prevent fraudulent accounts from flourishing, nor do they take responsibility when that leads to disaster.
It feels like they have little incentive to crack down aggressively – impersonators bring traffic; traffic brings ad revenue.
Until that changes, the impersonators will keep multiplying.
I might have won this particular Telegram battle, but I’m not confident we will win the war against shameless copycats like ‘Lona Bain’.
A spokesperson for Telegram told Metro: ‘Creating fraudulent accounts is explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service and such accounts are banned or flagged with the SCAM or FAKE tags whenever discovered.
‘Unfortunately, impersonation is possible on any platform. In addition to moderating scam accounts, Telegram allows notable people to verify their channels and groups, letting users know they are who they say they are and ensuring that they are presented at the top of search results.’
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