A young woman’s Facebook photos were stolen from her account and used on a dating profile that stated ‘not looking for anything serious’.
Karen Woodley was horrified when her university friend James Chisholm got in touch saying one of his mates had been chatting online to someone who was using two of her photos.
In a bizarre coincidence, James’ friend mentioned to him that he was going on a date with a girl and showed him the profile on dating website Plenty of Fish.
The girl called herself JodieWW and said she was a 24-year-old carer living in Milton Keynes.
But James realised the photos were actually of his friend, 23-year-old Karen, an occupational therapist living 70 miles away from Milton Keynes in Cheltenham.
At first the friend didn’t believe he had been duped and James had to show him Karen’s Facebook profile to prove the girl in the snaps was her and not ‘JodieWW’.
Karen, an occupational therapist who has been with boyfriend Nathan Adamson, 26, for two and a half years, said: “I felt really freaked out about it and Nate was really uncomfortable about it to.
“What if it had been one of his friends who had seen the profile and he genuinely thought that I was on a dating site?
“How could anyone do something so deceptive and horrible?
“I was so angry I decided to do something. I knew I couldn’t let her, or maybe even he, get away with it.”
Karen who has never had a profile on Plenty of Fish or any other dating site decided to set up an account and confront the person behind the stolen photos, as well as reporting them to the app.
She wrote to the mystery dater: “Sorry, but who are? Those are pictures of me!”
When the mystery dater still did not remove the account Karen reported it to the website and the profile was removed.
Now she wants to raise awareness about online privacy and warn other young women to pay careful attention to their settings on facebook.
She said: “I thought my Facebook account was completely private, but when I googled my name I realised that some of my pictures came up.
“And I also found out that you need to go through each profile picture individually on Facebook to make them private.
“That seems unnecessarily complicated so I want to warn people to be careful about what they put online.
“The whole thing really freaked me out because I don’t know how many people Jodie was speaking to or even if she put my pictures on any other sites.
She added: “It’s weird to think that if my friend hadn’t have seen it I would have never have known.”
Plenty of Fish was unavailable to comment.