Ep 494 “It undermines you as a person”: one woman’s experience of identity theft

Until a few weeks ago, 19-year-old UCC law student Alicia O’Sullivan had never heard of Admireme.vip. The website is an 18+ subscription-only platform, which describes itself as a place to share the “most intimate and secret content”. Alicia only became familiar with it after images purporting to be her appeared on the site. Someone had stolen her identity and set up a fake profile, doctoring pictures from her Instagram and photoshopping her face onto the bodies of nude women. Alicia went to the Gardaí about the scam, but feels she wasn’t taken seriously. In today’s episode, she speaks to The Irish Times journalist Jennifer O’Connell about that experience and why she has decided to speak out, launching the campaign group Safety Over Stigma, so others don’t have to go through the same ordeal. Also on the today’s show, Labour senator Ivana Bacik, whose party first introduced the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Bill that became Coco’s Law, explains why what happened to Alicia is illegal under this law and the need for better enforcement.

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