A Northern Ireland entrepreneur has told how he has fallen victim to online con artists who have stolen his identity as part of a Bitcoin scam.
James Blake's life has been made a living hell by Chinese criminals who have stolen his details to create hundreds of fake online profiles used to cheat people out of thousands of pounds in Bitcoin scams.
The 28-year-old, whose company operates in Belfast and Liverpool, says the profiles are all over social media on sites including Tinder, Instagram, Facebook and Quora – even on dating sites he has never heard of.
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One fake profile on WhatsApp even sent a victim a photograph of a counterfeit passport containing James’s personal details.
But only Tinder has acted to clamp down on the cons – all the other websites have refused to do anything. He even contacted the PSNI, who said they were powerless to help.
And, in a chilling Instagram exchange, a former “consultant” for the criminals whose job included creating his fake profiles warned him: “Please don’t make this information out. I will be killed.”
James, who started his first online business when he had just finished his A-Levels at Fort Hill Integrated College, Lisburn, said: “I’ve tried everything to nip this in the bud, but I’ve exhausted all options. It’s getting to the point now where I’ve just given up on it because I can’t seem to deter it in any way.
“To date, I’m aware that around £30,000 has been taken from different people because over the last year I have received so many messages from so many women. There was one guy as well. Some of them reached out to ask me if they could get receipts for the money they had invested!
“I’m getting about two messages A DAY from people saying they are chatting to me on a dating app or chatting to me on WhatsApp and obviously it’s not me!
“It’s just completely relentless but the social media companies won’t remove them – they keep saying they are not against their community guidelines, which is insane.”
Some of the fake profiles use variations of his name, with additional underscores or numbers at the end. Others range from adaptations of his real identity, such as “James Blakeston” to completely fictitious names including “Donald West”, “Tom Lew”, “George Lucas”, “Phil Willson, “Vladimir Timofey” and “Remy Brown”. One of the fakes even had the audacity to complain that James’s account was the bogus one.
There are also fake ads using his company name and his pictures, all designed to attract unsuspecting victims to be fleeced of their cash.
James said he first became aware of the fake profiles about 18 months ago after posting a picture of his “flashy” new car on social media. He said: “At first I thought it was funny and made jokes about it to my staff in the office.
“But as my business became more successful and there was more stuff out there about me, it just grew and grew and grew. I know now that anything I post online is instantly going to be taken to use on one of those accounts.
“At the same time, a lot of my income is generated from my online presence, so it’s a catch 22. If I remove myself from the internet, just disappear, then that leaves the way clear for one of them to take it, and all of a sudden theirs becomes the proper profile. It’s really scary.”
It got scarier when James received a message from a “consultant” claiming to have quit a job working for the people who make his fake profiles. The message said: “They let me use your photo… and create a specific character to meet some rich girl on dating apps and have a serious relationship building a trust.
“Let the girls open the bitcoin account and invest. For me I hate cheating and skip from there and go away now.”
When James asked who was behind the scams, the “consultant” said: “I don’t know their real name, they just use all fake names. This is [a] big industry, they are Chinese.
“Please don’t make this information out. I will be killed.”
James added: “If it was just one fake Tinder profile of me and that was it, then I’d deal with it in passing and it would be gone. But this is so many things.
“Some of these accounts are global so they are in Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Sweden and the US. There are even dating platforms I’ve never heard of as well. I’ve also seen social media sites in different languages that I’m on! That’s when you see the scale of this and it’s very worrying.
“It has got even more disturbing because one of the fake profiles on Whatsapp sent a photograph of a counterfeit passport with all my details on it to one of the victims to try to prove they were really me.
“At that point I freaked out and phoned the police. The police came out and said there was nothing they could do. Their opinion was, if you go and put yourself out there online then these things will happen, which I don’t agree with.
“They said these people could be anywhere in the world and we can’t go around contacting all the different police agencies.
“One of the fake profiles actually put photos of my family up from my social media and made up stories about my parents. It’s so disgusting, it literally is so invasive, but the platforms don’t want to do anything about it even though there are people losing money.
“I’ve also spoken to a contact I have inside of Facebook and he said there was nothing he could do about it either. He said just to continue reporting it but when I do I keep getting told it doesn’t go against their guidelines. That’s insane because these people are using my name, those of my family, my staff, my business and impersonating me.”
Victims have contacted James through his website and his real Instagram account, instagram.com/mrjamesblake, expecting him to help them get their money back. He said: “There was a woman in Florida who told me how she was encouraged to invest $15,000 over a period of months.
“To be honest, there were so many messages from people that it started breaking me down a bit and I said to my girlfriend I can’t go [on] like this. It was as if they expected me to be sorting it out for them but obviously there’s nothing I can do. Then a few of them turned nasty and were saying all sorts of things.
“It’s horrible for the people who are being scammed but it’s also very damaging to me and my business. I’m only 28 and I still have a massive career ahead of me so it’s very daunting to think my name could be tarnished.”
James wants everyone to know that he is NOT on Tinder, he is NOT looking for love and he is NOT trying to persuade people to invest in Bitcoin.
He said: “I actually don’t tell anyone to invest. I own a marketing company called Vindicta Digital, I have staff doing videos, we build websites, we do digital marketing campaigns, and that’s my primary business. The other business I operate is e-commerce and it’s not a very people-facing business.
“So it’s not even the case that I’m in that line of work of crypto-investments, so there wouldn’t be anything online about me to do with that, and if there is it’s a fake.”
A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, said: “We’re looking into the issue highlighted to us by the Daily Mirror. We put significant resources towards tackling these kinds of ads and profiles.
“It’s important to us that ads and profiles on Facebook and Instagram are useful to people and not used to promote deceptive behaviour, like using images of public figures to mislead people.
“Our systems get better when people report this kind of behaviour by tapping the three dots in the top right corner and selecting ‘Report Ad’.”
The PSNI were approached for comment.
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