From 2003 until now I've been posting pictures and videos online showing my exciting traveling and modeling experiences. One day in 2004 my older sister called me and asked what I was doing on yahoo personals. I told her I never opened Yahoo profile. That's when I realized that scammers were stealing my images to use on dating sites, they would create fake profiles with my images.
Even to this day they are still all over Facebook. I had a website where I posted all my pictures and I had a fan-base, so my fans would tell me about all the fake profiles. Then one of the biggest websites of romance scammers told ABC 20/20 that a man committed suicide after realizing that he sent $50,000 over a period of a year to a scammer from Ghana. They were using my images to scam him. He went into debt and felt ashamed then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
ABC 20/20 did a story, first they came to see me in Florida, then later flew me to New York City, put me in a hotel, plus my own driver to take me to the ABC Studios. I did the interview with Chris Cuomo, and I did not know the full story. I just knew that scammers where stealing my images online. In the middle of the interview Chris tells me what if I told you a man suicide himself by a scammer using your pictures. I was shocked and very sad and of course, that's why they didn't want to tell me what the interview was going to be about, they wanted a reaction for the cameras. That's how I learned about the damage that the scammers were doing to innocent victims and how easily men were getting fooled by the scammers stealing my images.
In 2013 a lawyer from a prominent law firm contacted me about filling a lawsuit, he found over 200 fake profiles on match.com. He filled a 1.5 billion dollar lawsuit against them for making profits off my images. There was allot of news media about the lawsuit, like the New York Post, Huffington Post, and even The Young Turks, but of course match.com has 50 lawyers. It's a shame how they can easily detect the face of an image by software, but they want to do their own scam by charging monthly memberships for their members to find "love".
Don't be fooled by a picture of a pretty woman or a handsome man, always tell them to show themselves on videos. I my opinion, video is the best proof of identity online. I enjoy steemit.com, and I prefer to post videos of myself to keep it real.
