Last week I pulled up in the beach carpark next to this guy driving a Stage One Land Rover (for all intents and purposes a Series 3 - if you know Land Rovers and want to ask, do so in the comments) who was driving this across the Nullabor. We exchanged Instagram connects as he plans to come back past our place to see our Defender. Social media is awesome for this - we've met lots of great people this way. Our account is thus valuable to us - a shame Meta doesn't get that, unless, of course, you pay a sub for them to do so.

There’s this old adage that the customer should always be right. And of course, the customer is sometimes an asshole, and sometimes lies. However, most dissatisfaction with Facebook seems to be real, genuine, lived experience. People whose accounts suddenly disappear. Years and years of photos just poof. Being locked out, shadowbanned, flagged by automation, or trapped in support loops where no human ever appears.

The other thing is, so what happened to me is that we run this account that’s got something like 18,000 to 20,000 followers on Instagram, and we used to pay a small amount for Meta Verified because we knew this stuff was going to happen. It was a kind of insurance for us while we were travelling, getting brand deals, making connections with people. We had years of content there, and I didn’t really want to lose any of it. It genuinely worried me because I’d spoken to more than a handful of people who had had this happen to them.

However, since we weren’t really using it that much, I thought maybe we could forego the expense. Would you believe — or maybe you would — two weeks later we see this account on my Facebook and on Jamie’s Facebook using our old reels, our old content of England, of Morocco, of travelling through landscapes with our Land Rover, all our personal details, all our content, just duplicated under another account. And every few days they’d rip something else and put it on their Facebook page, and it was one letter off. No, scratch that. It wasn’t even one letter off. The second word was decapitalised. So anyone who saw this content would be forgiven for thinking that was us. Maybe they hadn’t followed us after all and should follow this account.

But why? I asked Chatty:

What these people are usually doing is exploiting the trust and legitimacy that an established account has already built, because it is far easier to impersonate authenticity than to create it from scratch. By cloning your reels, your travel footage, your captions, your aesthetic, and even your names almost exactly, they inherit the appearance of a real human life with history, relationships, and social proof, which can then be leveraged for scams, fake giveaways, crypto schemes, phishing links, romance fraud, follower farming, engagement bait, reselling the account later, or simply gaming the algorithm with content they know already performed well. The reason they copy accounts like yours specifically is because travel and lifestyle pages project aspiration, mobility, trustworthiness, and emotional warmth, which makes followers less suspicious and more likely to engage, donate, click, or respond. The truly maddening part is not just that the impersonation exists, because impersonation has always existed online, but that the platforms often leave the burden of enforcement almost entirely on the victim, so you are effectively forced to monitor, report, document, and defend your own identity inside a system whose scale and automation make you feel invisible unless you are either extremely large, extremely profitable, or paying for access to support that used to be considered a basic responsibility of the platform itself.

OK, yep, so basic responsibility be damned, because they just have too many fraudsters to deal with. So how could they possibly be expected to deal with this? And you go, well, fuck it then, I’m gonna leave Facebook if that’s their attitude. But then if you do that, you lose access to communities, to business opportunities, to friends and connections you’ve made over the years, to years and years of content that you have created.

And so when you try to report this stuff, they go, “No, don’t see anything wrong with it.” And you’re like, for fuck’s sake, this is not us. It’s clear to see that it’s not us. What the hell is going on?

So we’ve told everybody we know to report it, because maybe that will help. I honestly don’t understand why this isn’t more regulated. No one actually seems to care. I've also signed back up to Meta so I can speak to someone about it and get it resolved. What happened to businesses serving the customer? Why are we in this situation where we pay for things that should be free?

Has this happened to you? What would you do?