Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
AN INTERNET MONITORING website overseen by the Department of Justice has warned of an “emerging trend” of intimate image abuse from scam accounts on Instagram.
Hotline.ie has warned of an increase in what they call cloned Instagram accounts in which scammers will impersonate real women and post links to webpages of pornography claiming to be of them.
Hotline.ie is Ireland’s national reporting centre for illegal online content, including child sexual abuse images and intimate images of a person which have been shared without their consent.
These scam accounts and the webpages associated with them violate the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020 also known as Coco’s Law, which carries a maximum penalty of a €5,000 fine and/or 12 months imprisonment.
Nineteen-year-old student Mia Connolly, whose name has been changed, was out for a meal with friends three months ago when she first noticed that someone was impersonating her.
At first she was asked by a number of people if she had made a new account on the social media app.
“But then after a few hours it posted all these photos of me with creepy sexually suggestive captions, and I noticed it was following dozens of men that I knew from Instagram. The fake account would mainly post on an Instagram story which disappears after 24 hours, and I think that made it easier for them to avoid people reporting it,” she told The Journal.
This impostor had scoured Mia’s real account to find friends and acquaintances, and at one point had followed over one hundred men to draw their attention before blocking Mia, to prevent her seeing and reporting the fraud.
The fake account used some photographs of her alongside photos showing other women with their faces hidden or obscured.
“It would show a nude woman from the neck down, so that they could make people think it was me. There were emojis barely covering her nipples and genital area. At the start I thought it was a joke, but then with that type of content with captions telling people to click a link to see more, appearing next to real photos of me I started getting worried, and then it started to follow my family members.”
‘A few people refused to believe it was fake’
This harmful phenomenon is so under-researched that it doesn’t have an official name but it’s been occurring on Instagram for almost half a decade.
Many victims of this crime are primarily concerned with the Instagram accounts themselves and don’t report the sites linked with them to Hotline.ie, according to a spokesperson for the centre.
“Thus, it is possible that Hotline.ie is only seeing a small sample of these incidents which might not be indicative of the true scale of the issue,” they said.
Mia was terrified that she could get removed from her college course if the account was able to get enough attention. Her fear was that university staff or potential employers might search for her name online and assume that this highly sexualised account was run by her.
“I know a few people my age who asked me about it and they just refused to believe it was fake and they would go around spreading rumours I was doing porn,” she said.
Dr Maggie Brennan, assistant professor in Dublin City University’s School of Psychology specialising in online safety and revenge pornography, says that sites like this generate revenue simply by having people visit them.
“Anyone that visits from that link is seen as a potential customer and they often send you to several different websites. So even if you don’t spend money the website will pay these perpetrators for the traffic they’ve generated from their links.”
“I don’t think that the people operating these accounts have any scruples about age at all. There are factors that they use to determine who to target, like someone’s amount of followers because that makes the most money. But occasionally they’ll use the profiles of underage girls and even if they know that they’re using a child’s identity for the purpose of selling pornography, they don’t care,” Dr Brennan added.
‘When I saw that it had followed my dad, my heart sank’
Mia’s experience is far from unique.
Aoife Hughes was making dinner in her student accommodation when she received dozens of messages from people telling her that her online identity had been stolen to sell pornography.
Aoife Hughes is not her real name; she didn’t want to link her identity to the porn industry any more than the perpetrators had already done.
“My phone started going off like crazy and it was from a load of different boys I knew letting me know that the account had followed them. It didn’t follow any of my female friends,” she said, several days after the incident.
“It followed my little brother and he had to see these perfectly innocent selfies of me that were stolen from my account and then put next to captions like ‘I’m ready to get naughty.’ But when I saw that it followed my dad, my heart sank. I had the most awkward phonecall of my life, almost in tears. And he was like ‘who did this?’ And obviously I didn’t know, I still don’t know.”
Like in Mia’s case, Aoife’s impersonator had blocked her so that she couldn’t even see this account herself.
She describes that day as being both terrifying and infuriating because she had to rely on messages and screenshots from her friends about what was happening.
Despite the high probability that the link on her account would be a virus, one of her friends took a risk and clicked on it, finding that it brought them to a profile on a porn website which also used Aoife’s full name and one of her photos as the profile picture.
Directly behind the profile picture – an inconspicuous selfie she took in her bedroom to show off a new hairstyle – was a photo of a collection of sex toys.
“I wanted to burst out in tears at that stage. I’m not sure how many people clicked the link but considering about one hundred people got a notification that this account was following them, at least a handful of them must have clicked it out of curiosity,” she said.
“Out of all the people that texted me to make me aware of the account, some of them were like ‘is this real?’ or ‘why did you make this?’. It was depressing to know that some people had actually fallen for it.”
‘They target ordinary young women because they have no resources at all to fight this’
Another woman who had to deal with this requested that only her first name be used.
Sarah, a 20-year-old student from Dublin, was appalled by what was written under photographs of her.
“It said like ‘if you’re nagging and wanting a gagging’ and disgusting stuff like ‘dirty little whore’ and it was so stomach churning to see someone not only writing that next to photos of me but doing it in a way to make people think I had written it.”
She has had fake Tinder accounts made of her in the past and feels as though this predatory behaviour towards women is treated as something they are expected to just accept and move on from.
“We shouldn’t have to put up with this. It’s so tiring,” she said.
“The fact that there was someone going through any photos where I was going out for the night or something and trying to choose which photos to make me look like a sex worker is so unnerving. It definitely makes me worried about what I post in future.”
Mia and Aoife’s only way to try and have their impostor accounts deleted was to ask their followers to report it, which forced them to bring even more attention to their existence: the exact opposite of what a frightened young woman would want to do in such a humiliating situation.
“The perpetrators of this often target people with thousands of followers, internet celebrities or models who already have a high level of people interacting with them,” Dr Brennan explained.
“But targeting ordinary young women is easier because they have no resources at all to fight this. They don’t have the lawyers or the connections within the social media companies to make these things go away in the blink of an eye which makes the whole ordeal so terrifying for them,” she added.
Dr Brennan considers this activity to be a form of image-based sexual abuse due to the emotional distress and humiliation caused to the women who fall victim to it.
This makes them targets as their follower counts translate to more traffic to the site and more money for the fraudsters.
Aoife reported the site to Hotline.ie and it was removed shortly afterwards.
‘Nowhere near enough people are aware of the scale of this or that it happens at all’
Reflecting on the situation weeks later she felt disheartened about how women are treated online.
“The internet has had creeps on it for a while but the fact it’s impossible to avoid people trying to use you for sexual reasons is very depressing. I wouldn’t have even known it existed if people hadn’t pointed it out to me. I think the account was only active for a few days before it was brought to my attention but it could have been longer.”
Aoife pointed out that many women already feel unsafe in day-to-day life “and now Instagram isn’t even a safe place for us to be because someone could use your name and photos for something like this and not care about what damage it does to your reputation or self-esteem,” she said.
Mia Connolly managed to rally enough friends and sympathisers to report the account impersonating her, and it was subsequently deleted by Instagram.
But days later another account appeared, and as of the time of writing has not been removed yet.
“People thought I was hacked or whatever and it’s been reported loads, maybe twenty times and it’s still up. At least twenty people reported the second one. But if Instagram knows it happened to me before then why is it so hard for them to take action again?” she questioned.
She fears that whoever made these accounts has a stockpile of photos of her and that she’ll be stuck in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, forever trying to report new accounts when a friend brings it to her attention, only for another to appear.
Dr Brennan believes that an untold number of women and girls across the world find themselves in the same distressing situation as Aoife and Mia and Sarah, often with little recourse.
“I have no idea how often this occurs, which is a problem in and of itself. Nowhere near enough people are aware of the scale of this or that it happens at all. And if we can’t see the problem then we can’t respond to it.”
Is it possible to stop this happening?
One potential way to deal with this is to seek prosecution against the perpetrator - which is often incredibly difficult due to the anonymity provided by the internet, and the difficulty that large entities like Instagram have with cooperating with gardaí on case-by-case issues.
Jamie Klingler co-founded the Reclaim These Streets activist group in the UK to bring attention to violence against women shortly after the initial disappearance of Sarah Everard, but since found herself campaigning for a different but related cause.
She also fell victim to the same pornographic impersonation on Instagram and had to resort to asking her eighteen thousand Twitter followers to report the account.
When Klingler brought the matter to London’s Metropolitan Police in February, she was told there was “no realistic prospect of identifying suspects” and the case was closed.
After backlash on social media Klingler’s case was reopened, leading her to remark that “there’s got to be a way other than making it go viral. It shouldn’t be that I get special treatment for this because I’ve been on the news.”
The Department of Justice has urged anyone who has been a victim of this crime to report it to Hotline.ie or to contact An Garda Síochána.
Speaking about Coco’s Law specifically, the Department added: “The new legislation is intentionally silent about the types of technology that may be used to commit the offences so as to cover all forms of online and offline communications that cause harm to a victim.”
The closest any of these women have come to finding out the identity of the people responsible for their shame was Sarah, who attempted to log into the pornographic Instagram account and selected the ‘Forgot Password’ option.
This sent a code to the phone number used to make the account.
While the number itself was hidden on her screen she was able to see that it began with the number 63, the national telephone identifier number for the Philipines which means her imitators were likely based there.
This information was of little comfort to her.
Despite their best efforts, there is little that can be currently done to prevent this from happening to these women again, or to other women on social media.
Yet again another energy security article that doesn’t tackle the governments stance on energy generation. Baseline energy requirements cannot be met by wind/wave sources due to intermittency of generation. Batteries can help but even that doesn’t solve the issue. To remove/reduce carbon emitting fossil fuel sources by 2050 and be truly energy secure then we absolutely must start talking about the nuclear option.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: Absolutely agreed nuclear needs sensible discussion and consideration, however don’t expect for one second that our politicians will educate themselves sufficiently to bring a palatable proposal to the people…
@Ruairi: unfortunately I agree with you. It’s bonkers that the people in charge of these decisions appear to be so uninformed!
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: They’re main worry is political currency and Nuclear energy cost alot of that. It’s as big a fight as they would have to make and I don’t think any of them have the appetite for it maybe the change in minds on climate change might send us down that road, but opposition or the not in my back yard lobby would be massive.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: I don’t want to pay for this. EDF Hinckley Point £92.50/MWh for 35 years with a guaranteed annual escalation rate. I’d rather pay the £39/MWh for the latest UK offshore wind tenders. That is subsidy free and below average wholesale market price. You would have to focus on renewables and energy efficiency first. You have to consider everything before nuclear. Even decommissioning data centres. On an associated note, you can’t insure a nuclear plant. The tax payer picks up the bill in the event of an accident. Although that’s probably the least of your concerns at that point.
@C: I understand your point re cost but Hinckley Point C is being created with future UK energy consumption in mind hence the price point. Ireland has a much much lower energy requirement in comparison and the type of reactor (modular SM) suitable for use in Ireland is of completely different design. The price point is comparably much lower than that you’ve quoted making it comparable with that of renewables. With regards to costing for renewables yes it is lower but it cannot by its very nature provide a constant reliable source of energy.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: Biomethane plants can be built all around Ireland and can provide the renewable gas to back up electrical generation from wind. Another nice thing is that the renewable gas can be stored or used for thermal or transport when wind and solar is available. Win win
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: We need to go Nuclear and we will go Nuclear it is just a case of when.
Minister Bruton is from the “nuclear is explody stuff” generation as is Ryan and are clueless on SMRs & nuclear tech.
None of the politicians have the stomach for a political fight on this and would see no votes in it. They would see Nuclear as an issues hotter potato than Irish Water.
Furthermore the Tinfoil Brigade loons like G’OD would have a field day with invented nonsense and would be given equal access to media for “balance” as it would bw great clickbate.
So Ireland will continue to dig ourselves into a CO2 hole until the fines become intolerable.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: Intermittency of generation doesn’t need to be an issue at all let alone a reason to write it off. Electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen can be carried out during times of high production. Then the hydrogen can be used as an extremely clean fuel to generate power during low production periods, smoothing out supply. There are numerous other storage systems such as hydro gravity stores and of course batteries. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t meet all of our energy demands through renewables. Britain has 2000 offshore wind turbines, while Ireland has only 7. We’re way behind the curve.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: Costs for nuclear rarely seem to include decommissioning, storage of radioactive waste and an estimate of insurance cost. The last one is unquantifiable as it is so large. What insurance company would insure or is capable of insuring an accident that left Dublin uninhabitable and destroyed Leinster’s food production for hundreds of years? Why should shareholders get a free pass on that cost? There are no easy answers to the energy question but no matter which way I look at this, nuclear is the technology of last resort.
@Paraic: you misunderstand me Paraic I’m not writing off renewables at all – I’m actually a big fan! However if the conversation is around energy security and given that energy demand will rise and the disparity between generation and demand will continue to increase we need to begin discussing additional options to fill the gap between renewables and fossil fuels. IMO nuclear is the only current technology that makes significant returns on investment where energy generation is concerned.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: and how much and where will we dump the nuclear waste? It would have to be built on high ground especially if we get flooded every winter. Good luck with planning permission. Unless it’s cold fusion nuclear at least that waste is only 150yrs toxic but we are not there yet with that are we? How are Japan coping with their nuclear disaster? Christ all the poop we produce both animal/human in this country we could turn it methane some of it still going into the sea untreated! I suppose it’s not as sexy as nuclear… There are negatives for even oil/gas but nuclear has more cons than pros. It needs uranium that is not infinite so that hoping from one sinking ship to another…..
@C: Now now don’t be talking sense to these people……all nuclear plants world wide should be decommissioned, natural disasters do happen and when they do if one of these plants is in the area well lets just say its game over…..nothing is worth that risk, its only a matter of time before we have another catastrophe at one of these plants around the world……I say no thanks!
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: “Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022″ Not for no reason are Germany and many other countries phasing out nuclear power generation. You can read all about it here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
@Paraic: thanks but I don’t need a link to Wikipedia to know about the industry I have experience in it. Yes Germany have said they’re closing down nuclear plants on the basis of the Fukushima accident. They’re also purchasing nuclear energy from the french to fill the gap between supply and demand! Make of that what you will.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor: Aaand France is running into major budget overruns with respect to it’s nuclear plants. In November 2018, President Macron announced the 50% nuclear power reduction target is being delayed to 2035, and would involve closing fourteen 900 MWe reactors. The two oldest reactors, units 1 and 2 at Fessenheim, will close in 2020. But then you knew that right?
@Paraic: I didn’t know that actually but I do know they’re preparing to build at least six more over the next two decades.
@C: You really show yourself up talking about Hinkley and the other old types. No one in their right minds is suggesting going that way. Modular molten salt types are the name of the game. If they got a tenth of what has been put into wind power over the past while, our climate problem would already be half solved. $2bn in the US , €2bn in Germany. Moltex are a good example but there are ten others worldwide, with China and India in the lead.
@Dr Alison O’ Connor:
The article is about a report that conclude our best options for obtaining carbon neutrality in terms of electricity generation.
I’m sure nuclear will be mentioned, and if not then they will have had to come up with a robust solution in its absence.
It sounds like the preffered solution will be a mixture of biogas, pumped storage (hydro), battery storage, interconnection and smart grid demand reduction.
@Nicholas Grubb: Neves mind those companies. There’s a guy called Zefram Cochrane who is developing an energy source that will solve all of our problems. Google him. He’s a genius. Light years ahead of everyone else.
Total madness here. This massive reliance on wind and even much worse solar, is a disaster in the making. What happens when the wind isn’t blowing.? Wind only works for 35% of the time, and that’s not all peak demand time. Let alone when we get a two or three week, winter blocking high. All been subsidy driven and who has been paying the subsidies. Us with the so called PSO. One third of which has been going for the also disastrous “jobs in the bogs” scheme. And who got the subsidies.? Not the ordinary citizen, but glossed up side shoots of the ESB, Coillte and Bord na Mona. Wonder who will pay the five million Euro fine re Derrybrien. The company or us.?
Coal burning for power in SE Asia is going exponential. Saudi Aramco tell us they will be pumping oil at the present rate for the next fifty years. Shut down our farming and bring the food from where they’ve cut down a rain forest instead.
There is only one way we will solve this climate problem. Find a source of electric energy on a scale and cost that keeps the fossil fuel in the ground. There is such a way, invented back in the early sixties and hastily suppressed by the fossil fuel lobby.
This should be super stimulated forward right now by a really hefty UN administered levy on aviation and bunker fuel of which worldwide we are using eleven million barrels a day.! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju59gcdmdvI&t=81s
@Nicholas Grubb: Lots of errors here. Wind will generate greater than 90% of the time with an annual load or capacity factor of 35%. Google the definitions. With regard to firm power. It’s the job of the National Grid to schedule power. They don’t permit renewable power on the grid without being able to support periods of low wind. Bogus arguments.
@C: in fairness, running all that reserve (mainly gas units) to support the wind is very expensive though
@Dow Dubrov: Redundancy in that sense is always costly but efficiencies will be found. I reckon the original argument is a bit reductive.
@Nicholas Grubb: Well I live in North Cork and the wind never stops blowing. We rarely use our garden furniture as its too breezy. We live near a wind farm but there should be far more of them. Yes it changed the look of the mountain but it’s an impact I can see rather than breathing the fumes from oil and solid fuels that I can’t see.
@C: Yes, I admit you are total right. We can do all that with LNG, which is the present plan. But that isn’t a fossil fuel is it.? Anyone who would like to see a very Alt view on all this, drop me a line to ndecg@yahoo.ie and I will send you a two pager that no one will publish.
@Dow Dubrov: Fair points but remember the grid operator and plant operators will rely on weather forecasting to schedule plants so conventional plants are run as efficiently as possible. It’s in their interest to minimise costs. Also, for reliability reasons, the grid has to be able to cope with the loss of the single largest generating plant and keep going without disruption. It has generating plant turned on and in reserve. Therefore a grid will have capacity for wind to a certain level without any changes to the grid or costs to us.
We import I think around 9 billion of oil, gas and coal each year ( when I last checked) wouldn’t it be great if the government would take 10% of this per year and developed biomethane plants. This can use all the animal, food, sludge wastes and a limited amount of energy crops to product storable energy (in the existing gas network). Then this energy can be used for electrical, thermal and transport. On top of this Co2 can be carpeted, reused or stored directly from biomethane plants.
@david hynes:see link for biomethane upgrading and co2 recovery from a plant in the isle of wight UK
https://youtu.be/zmXByBTdZEI
@david hynes:
This is already the plan. Planning to build a large network of biogas facilities for farmers and industry to dump their waste products.
Will electricity bills begin to come down if the power is from a renewable source?
@Joseph Lyons: In theory yes it should, In reality though I’m willing to bet not so much.
how much carbon generated for the lorry loads of concrete for windmill bases
@ed w: The answer is lots but then every power plant needs lots of concrete. The point of the wind farm is you are not burning fuel for 25 or 30 years. (And free of cost adding to the nation’s energy security).
@ed w: including manufacture of the turbine and concrete wind works out about 11grammes CO2 per kwh, that compares with burning gas at 50 grm per kwh and 80 grm for coal. That doesn’t include the CO2 for extracting the fuels or building the power stations.
A fascinating presentation given by Cambridge Prof Michael Kelly, former chief scientific advisor to UK local government.
It demonstrates how different reality is to public perception.
Skip the intro,
@Seamus Hughes: I’ve seen something similar from a few years ago, it included things like having to blanket someone else’s desert with solar panels to meet energy demand. However his solution was simple cut energy demand.
He managed to cut his by nearly half with very little compromise
oooh a review cant wait
Is thorium the answer .Moneypoint is ideal for it
have your say