What do you do when you're a celebrity, a brand or even just a regular-ass person who has an impostor imitating you on the Internet?
You can take theRihanna approach and call out the fake accounts one by one (slow), you could spend time hunting down the impostors and reporting them to Facebook (also slow), or you can hire a digital bounty hunter Kevin Long to make your problem disappear — fast, according to a profile on Huffington Post.
It might sound like a lot to pay a guy hundreds to thousands of dollars to eliminate fake social media accounts, but powerful people are reportedly glad to shell out that kind of dough for Long's services, especially since there are so many fakes. Long's company has worked with preachers, whose fake accounts were scamming people out of money, and A-list celebrities.
“Some of our clients get two or three thousand fake accounts in a year,” the head of a company that deals with actors, musicians and CEOs and uses Long's services told HuffPo.
Because he's in constant contact with the right people, Long's company Social Impostor can reportedly make accounts vanish much faster than the average user.
He even keeps track of celebrity impostors who are not his clients, telling the website that the people who are impersonated the most on social media are "Justin Bieber (2,034 imitators), Pope Francis (1,820 imitators) and Beyoncé (2,379 imitators)."
Of course, we all know that sometimes the fake accounts are way more entertaining than the real thing. Case in point:
