I’m kind of at my wits’ end. I’ve heard of deep fakes and stuff like that but I don’t know, this feels like it’s gone too far.
Sorry, let me back up.
The first time I remember thinking something was off was about six months ago. Now, I’m not really into social media, but I do have an account on a certain photo based platform that I post to every few weeks. Nature pictures from hikes, my cats, the occasional selfie of me and my partner. Usual stuff.
I was scrolling through my old posts one day and noticed something. It was a post I definitely don’t remember making. Some kind of blurred pattern. All black and red. It didn’t have any likes. I had supposedly posted it three months prior.
At the time it seemed weird but I honestly didn’t give it much thought. I’ve had accounts hacked in the past so I went through the usual steps. Delete the post, change passwords, etc. It didn’t happen again for a while so I figured I was in the clear.
Jump forward five months. One month ago. That’s when things started getting scary. I was checking my account (something I did semi-regularly now) and saw two more posts. One from three weeks ago, the other from ten days ago. I know for sure that these posts could not have been up there for as long as they said. I probably looked just three days before and saw nothing. That was unsettling, but I’m not expert on these things so maybe there was a reasonable explanation. But the content of the photos was what really sent a shiver down my spine.
The first one, the one that said it was posted three weeks ago, was all black and red again. Super saturated and vivid. This one wasn’t blurry, but the saturation made it hard to make out. It looked vaguely like a figure from the chest up.
The second one, the one from ten days ago, looked like some variation of the same picture. But this one was clearer. A little grainy, but not hard to make out. No black and red this time. Just a picture of a person from the chest up.
Me. It was a picture of me.
But it wasn’t. The icy eyes were lighter than mine. The pasted on smile was an expression I’ve never seen my face make. Not to mention the deep red top with a flared out collar I was wearing was something I didn’t even recognize, much less own.
Nevertheless, I searched through the photos on my phone to see if it was somewhere in there. It wasn’t, of course.
This is where I started thinking about deep fakes. I didn’t want to work myself into a panic. This was obviously someone fucking with me. It had to be. And I’d be giving them exactly what they wanted if I started freaking out. I don’t know why someone would fuck with me like this, but it was the only rational explanation.
I was about to delete the two photos and repeat the password change process when something gave me pause. Just like the last one, neither of these posts had any likes. For the first two I could justify it. It seemed unlikely that out of three-hundred-something followers, not one would click the heart mistaking it for abstract art or something. Unlikely, but possible.
But that third one was basically a selfie. There’s no way it was up for ten days and nobody liked it. Not even my partner. Which gave me another thought.
My partner (I’ll just call her Charlie here) was in the other room at the time. I went and asked her to pull up my profile on her phone, and my suspicion was confirmed. She didn’t see the photos at all.
I showed her from my phone and she agreed that it was creepy but that I shouldn’t get worked up. I figured I’d change my info, but leave those two pictures up as evidence or something. I had the feeling now that it wasn’t going to stop.
And sure enough. Two weeks later, another picture of “me” was posted. Different unfamiliar outfit. This time outside. It looked like the fence in my back yard behind me, but I couldn’t tell for certain. Same icy eyes and frozen smile.
Every four days or so after that there was another one. They looked crystal clear at this point, unlike the grainy texture in the first few I contacted the site’s support and was told that they couldn’t see what I was talking about from their end. It was starting to get to me. I was checking for new posts every five minutes. I felt paranoid.
And that brings us to today. I got home from work and saw a new post was up. The location was pretty clear this time. Right across the street from my job. And my face was a little different in this one. Compared to the others, I looked kind of excited in this picture.
I had enough. I took one last look at the pictures and deleted my account. As soon as I hit the “confirm” button, I received a video call. From my number.
Against my better judgement, I answered it. And there she was. Me. Creepy fucking smile and all. She was wearing unfamiliar clothes, as always, and her movements didn’t mirror my own. She wasnt moving much, but I could see the little shifts of the camera and adjustments of the face that showed this wasn’t just a still frame.
After a moment spent frozen in fear, I noticed what was behind her. The same headboard I was resting against. But on the other side of the bed. My head turned to look automatically, but she wasn’t there. I looked back to the phone. She was excited. Not just excited, actually. She was thrilled.
I must have really been frozen because at that moment Charlie walked in and apparently didn’t notice I was in a state. She walked over to her bedside table to grab her chapstick or something, and out of the corner of the screen I saw her. It was Charlie. In this fake me’s camera. Grabbing her chapstick.
The imposter’s mouth began to move like she was about to say something, but I hit the “end call” button before she did. I burst into tears, alerting Charlie to my condition. She consoled me, moving us away from the bed and into the living room as I informed her of what happened between sobs.
It’s now about an hour later. My phone won’t stop ringing. I am typing this through tears. I don’t know what to do. If someone really is fucking with me, congratulations. I’m absolutely terrified.
Sorry if this isn’t formatted well or doesn’t make sense. I’m shaking and I just needed to get this out. I guess I am just hoping someone out there has had something like this happen? Or someone with more of an understanding on deep fakes and cyber security can provide some sort of reasonable explanation? Please, somebody has to know how to make it stop.