We’ve all heard the warnings about people pretending to be someone else online and the warnings to be vigilant that who we are communicating with on the internet, checking who they actually are and many of us are familiar with the term ‘catfish’ (a word coined for those who create fake profiles to deceive), but what happens when the roles are reversed? When someone is actually pretending to be you?
If someone were to impersonate someone else online, you’d perhaps expect it to be a celebrity or a sports star, or someone fairly recognisable in the public domain. You wouldn’t expect it to be a 32-year-old freelance writer from Maesteg.
But that is exactly what happened to 32-year-old Andrew Lloyd. In August 2024, Andrew discovered he had an imposter, and that his imposter was keeping tabs on him from over 1,100 miles away. Not only this, but he was using Andrew’s photos to front social media profiles where he would chat to – and in some cases – berate women online.
But it was only by chance that Andrew discovered his mimic, who had been acting under a pseudonym for many years. Andrew had posted an Instagram story and was checking who had viewed it, or “keeping an eye on who was keeping an eye on me” as he phrased it, when he saw his own face looking back at him. Initially thinking it was perhaps a glitch in the app, he explored further, only to find someone had been impersonating him by using his photos online for nearly five years.
“I was sitting in bed at around 1am in the morning, ready to settle down, and I was looking at my Instagram story that I had posted that day and I noticed there was a new viewer I’d never seen before and the profile photo was a photo of me,” Andrew said.
“I clicked on their account and their account was private. I still at this point thought ‘maybe this is just a weird glitch’ or ‘maybe this is just my phone playing up’ or a Meta glitch, and the profile had a Facebook link so I clicked on that and there was just a barrage of my own face in front of me on someone else’s profile with a Polish name.”
Andrew discovered dozens of his photos were being used by a man who named himself Pawl (surname redacted)
(Image: Andrew Lloyd)
Andrew, who works as a freelance writer and journalist, had previously had a private profile but had made it public in order to share examples of his work. He said that as a result of this he often had people who were not following him viewing his posts or stories, but had never seen this account before.
Describing how he felt once he realised that this wasn’t indeed an error, and that someone named Pawel [whose surname we have redacted] had seemingly been impersonating him for several years, Andrew said: “It’s weird. I think so many things happen in life and you think ‘well I know how I should feel about this’ because even if I haven’t experienced this, someone else has, the emotion is obvious but I didn’t know how to feel, it was very confusing.
“I was confused, and then freaked out, and then weirdly flattered, and then as I scrolled and then seeing how long he had been doing this for – around five years – and how many ‘friends’ he had and how deep this went, it started to click that this was probably not that funny and more concerning.”
On Instagram, “Pawel” had 691 followers and he was following more than 2,600 people. On Facebook there were more than 4,600 ‘friends’, around six times what Andrew had on his own profile. The profiles had dozens of photos of Andrew’s face. Both profiles were private, limiting Andrew’s ability to contact his doppelganger.
Andrew said he first found the profile when someone viewed his Instagram story whose profile picture was one of his from 2016. This is a recent photo of Andrew.
(Image: Andrew Lloyd)
“Weirdly he was not following me on Instagram. He’d been very clever, I had no idea about him. Because my profile is public and I share articles and things on there, I often have people on my profile who don’t follow me and I don’t know who they are and I take that for granted.
“My guess is that he had been viewing my profile with a different profile and just made the mistake of viewing my story with the profile with a photo of me so he has probably been watching my stories or viewing my profile for at least five years. I think I looked at my Instagram story when the story was quite close to expiring as well so if I hadn’t looked on that I would still have no idea this day that this guy was out there.”
The photo “Pawel” was using on the profile was from 2016, taken at a bookshop in Cardiff with an iPhone 5. The image was fairly nondescript compared to some of the professional, headshot style photos he could have chosen from.
Because the profile was private, Andrew could only see so far and so decided to set up his own fake profile in an attempt to find out more and ultimately contact his catfish. “I thought I need to see this guy’s full profile to know the extent of what he has got on me, but I didn’t want to become his friend because I knew he had taken photos from my Instagram but didn’t know about Facebook so I didn’t want to become his friend and give him all those extra photos,” said Andrew.
“I thought ‘I’ll catfish this catfish’, so I went on google and found a photo of this cartoon character and made up a name and an account. I was expecting some verification process on Facebook as I hadn’t made an account in like 15 years but it is quite mad really how easy it is to create your own fake account. Suddenly you’re on Facebook with a fake account and Facebook will even suggest people for you to add as friends and sort of help you become a catfish.”
The first message Pawel sent to Andrew after the made it public that someone was using his photos. Details of Pawel’s profile redacted.
Andrew sent the man he believes to be Pawel – whose description of himself ironically translated to“always be yourself” – a friend request but when it wasn’t approved, curiosity got the better of him and he decided to send him a message. When Pawel’s privacy settings meant the message couldn’t be sent, Andrew commented publicly on one of his photos and shared what had happened on his own social media in the hopes of prompting a response and alerting his friends and family of his impersonator.
“I decided to post it all over my Instagram story then. One to warn my friends and family that if this person tries adding you, it’s not me, and two in the hopes that if he saw my recent story it may prompt him to get in touch which is exactly what happened. He then sent me a message asking me how I knew him which was strange.
“So I sent him the same message and I was annoyed at him at this point but I thought if I want to get information out of him I probably shouldn’t start by just shouting at him over the internet so I was very kind of withdrawn and saying things like ‘I’m not annoyed at you I just want answers’.”
Eventually Andrew got a response, but he said the responses were confusing – on one hand because he thought Pawel could have been being difficult, but on the other the messages were translated from English to Polish and reversed. “It was a very slow riddle trying to figure out what he was even as he was telling me,” said Andrew.
The term ‘catfish’ was coined in 2010 with the release of an MTV documentary with the same name which follows a man who developed an online friendship with a 40-year-old housewife mainly presenting herself as an 18-year-old girl. There were nine series that followed, where people would uncover who exactly it was they had built relationships with online.
The online personas often turned out to be friends or acquaintances of those being deceived, or in some cases complete strangers buoyed up by using a fake profile to masquerade as a fake identity and start a relationship. As a result, Andrew thought he had an idea in his head of the type of person who may be using his images.
“I had this idea of who he was in my head. I thought maybe he was young or a loner, and maybe he was doing this because he thought it was funny and edgy or maybe he’s a bit isolated. But in my head I depicted him as a teenager or in his 20s in his bedroom. But when he said he was a 42-year-old father-of-two from Warsaw, that’s when I felt even weirder because then I felt like he had catfished me.
“He was acting vulnerable and ashamed of himself and then his tone would change and I would think I was dealing with one person and then it changed to someone else.” Initially Andrew said he felt in control of the situation as he thought he was the only person affected by this, but when Pawel shared he used the profile to speak to – and in some cases insult women – Andrew was more concerned.
Andrew said he discovered the impersonator after they viewed his social media story
(Image: Andrew Lloyd)
“While I was under the impression that he was just pretending to be me and just posting with my photos, because I was the person it was happening to, I was sort of in control of how I felt about it and how it impacted me so I could decide whether or not to be annoyed about it.
“But when I found out that he was insulting random women on the Internet and making fun of them for appearances and worse still tricking women into relationships to the point where they were sending him personal images, that’s when I realised the seriousness had gone up a notch and I felt much worse about it.
“It was very strange, he almost had like five different moods. These conversations took place over a couple of days. On one day he might be really awkward and apologetic and wouldn’t necessarily tell me what he had done, he would just tell me how ashamed he was and then the next day he was almost proud of his actions and then he would just like very bluntly tell me that he tricked women and he found it quite funny how naive they were.
“I think I felt more upset on behalf of the other people because I thought, well, I’ve just found out this guy is doing this to me and this is strange. But these other people have no idea and I’m not sure if they know to this day.”
Andrew said that at this point his emotions were conflicted, what he initially thought was jovial had turned much more sinister. “Weirdly after talking about how ashamed he was, he then asked for permission to keep the account going. I just thought this person doesn’t feel bad about it.
“I told him I wanted him to remove the account and tell anyone he was still speaking to that he wasn’t me. Then he said he would do that. We carried on speaking for a few days and he told me he removed the account but then I clicked on it and he hadn’t, it was such an easy lie to see through.
“But he had removed my photos. Even to this day the account is still there and the images are gone but at any point he could put new images in and he still has 4,600 friends. I’m not confident that he has turned his back on it, he could still have five other accounts. At the end of this, Pawel is obviously not his real name, he could be lying to me, he could be a 25-year-old from Maesteg, I’ll never know.”
Andrew says that the experience has made him scrutinise how he uses social media, specifically what he posts and he monitors who is viewing his posts. While he did reverse image search some of his images, he said Pawel was “very clever” in the fact he used images Andrew would never think to check were being used elsewhere,
“Coincidentally, in recent months, I decided that the more stuff I was posting to do with my professional life and I was getting from people I didn’t know viewing my profile, the less comfortable I was sharing stuff from my personal life so this came like a very strange time. Join our WhatsApp news community here for the latest breaking news. You will receive updates from us daily.
“It did make me think, who else still out there who spoke to him? Like who has this impression of this version of me and what are the implications? I know I’ll never really know the full extent of it because I can never really speak to the victims of it. There was a moment where I reached out to him asking for the names of them and thought they might be good to speak to but he didn’t let me. Maybe it’s good if they think that person just disappeared.
“It’s funny because I think that we are the digital savvy generation and I think because of shows like MTV Catfish we are very aware of people pretending to be other people, but I don’t think we consider that people might be pretending to be us. And I think because we are just regular people and are not celebrities or anything, I think it is precisely actually the kind of people on the planet this sort of thing may happen to.”
“Pawel’s” Facebook profile is still online, albeit without the images. Andrew says he still checks in on him sometimes, just in case his images have started cropping up again. While they have no contact, Andrew says that he is almost sure despite going public with his experience, Andrew wrote about his experience for The Guardian, Pawel would respond to his messages if he were to reach out.
“I blocked him from viewing my story but we can still message and weirdly I feel like if I was to message him right now, he would reply. He’s still right there if I want to speak to him but his last message was sort of like ‘I’m bored now’. I’m fascinated by him and also like a bit freaked out by him and keep him at arm’s length. I purposefully didn’t completely block him because I want to keep an eye on him.”