Author Spotlight
Preston Hooker
“girl do u wanna fight???”
Senior Blakely Faulkner’s online impersonator threatened to fight people, sexually messaged many and built Faulkner an unwanted reputation, all under her name.
The mimic started with a TikTok account using a baby photo of Faulkner from an old VSCO post at the bottom of her profile from over 10 years ago. The photo seemed to be Faulkner’s, leading viewers — fellow students in the Johnson County area — to believe it was truly her running the account.
The wannabe-Faulkner managed to remove the watermark on Faulkner’s actual TikTok videos, making the post seem original and first-hand, convincing viewers of the fake account’s validity.
“The person who was pretending to be me texted a girl and called her a ‘short-stack’ and threatened to fight her,” Faulkner said. “I would never say that to anyone. They were also sexting people and asking to have sex with all these guys [and] telling them that I didn’t have Snapchat so they couldn’t text me [to clear things up].”
Some of these boys, in contact with the fake account, would attempt to find Faulkner’s real personal Snapchat account and accuse her of being a liar and hiding herself from them.
For the past two years, Faulkner has had to explain to each of the catfished users that it wasn’t her inappropriately messaging them on TikTok but someone pretending to be her. To this day, Faulkner still receives an occasional message from a catfished boy, asking why she “ghosted them.”
Deceptive emails, fraudulent double-charges and impersonating accounts each contribute to the internet scams within the SM East community and go on to potentially have life-long impacts on the victim’s digital footprint far beyond the bounds of Johnson County.
Faulkner went to the Prairie Village Police a year ago, yet they couldn’t do anything due to the anonymous nature of the account. Faulkner ended up seizing control of the situation herself, reporting the accounts for months until she finally got the TikTok account taken down last year.
Despite the damage being done from the account already, the everlasting effects of the impersonator have stuck with Faulkner, especially in her senior year.
“Sometimes I really do worry about [the fake accounts] for college,” Faulkner said. “I plan on rushing, and I don’t want [this] to get in the way of things. If all that I knew about someone from social media was that they were bullying or sexting people, I’d probably tell people.”
But identities aren’t the only things scammers want. Senior Kate Rose purchased Blue Raspberry Gushers, an orchid flower LEGO set, lip tint and a window perch for her cat, Lou, to sit in off the new social-media-based online shopping app “TikTok Shop.” Once she had all her goodies, she entered her information and made the $163 purchase.
Almost instantly, Rose was double-charged from the single purchase and was in debt to TikTok Shop until her bank disputed the transaction to get her money back, as well as her desired trinkets.
“It was just the money that was the problem,” Rose said. “I’m broke already and did not need the [additional] $163 taken.”
What may seem like a small accident may be an attempt on consumers’ wallets — double charges are commonly intentional, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Although Rose’s issue started and ended with a financial mixup, the effects of online fraud burrow deeper than fruit snacks and makeup.
That 22% adds up to around $84 billion spent on false ads worldwide. This means nearly every deceitful pop-up, scam message, fake website and social media bot accounts for almost a fourth of all the advertisements on the internet; a fourth of all ads East students and faculty consume.
The scams don’t stop at high schoolers and their shopping mix-ups. When principal Jason Peres started at East four years ago, he was determined to start with as few roadblocks as possible. Unbeknownst to him, in those first few vital weeks, his work identity would be stolen — and it wouldn’t be the last time.
Peres began to receive forwarded messages and warnings that there was an email under his name asking staff members for their personal phone numbers and location, information likely to be sold online or used to lure others into a fraudulent scam.
“About four to five times a year, I get a random email from a coworker that says, ‘Hey, there’s another scam,’” Peres said. “Luckily, it’s happened so frequently that people are wise to it.”
The impersonating emails aren’t going away and are a part of the position — if you’re the principal, you’re going to be impersonated, Peres said. High-profile jobs are often targeted the most by impersonators, according to the Federal Trade Commission in a 2023 article. The targeting applies to public education figures, as most of their professional information is easily accessible online.
“It really happens to me because they always go after the principal,” Peres said.
“People tend to respond faster [to me].”
If Peres’ faculties’ information gets out, it can jeopardize their physical safety as well as their digital safety, such as having their addresses leaked for anyone to visit.
There have been numerous other instances of identity fraud within the district. On March 7, a phisher posing as a district employee sent out a request for a mass password reset to East faculty, likely trying to gain access to the victim’s account by asking to “confirm current password,” Peres said.
The district-targeted scams aren’t your average one-off spam call asking about car insurance. If no one realized the email was fake, Peres’s identity and reputation could’ve been ruined, socially discrediting him as a principal.
The scammers often impersonate principals and other authority figures as soon as they come to power, taking advantage of the lack of clarity at the moment of the victim’s initial hire for the scammer’s benefit, according to Peres.
The district has attempted to combat these scams through various training seminars for staff. But challenges remain — SMSD contact information is public, along with the websites where teachers do their daily tasks and assign classwork. Shawnee Mission Information and Communications Executive Drew Lane oversees the technological security of the district, including every SMSD staff member.
“Each year, we provide essential annual training on how to spot and avoid phishing emails,” Lane said. “A few times a year, we will run a fake phishing campaign for us to determine how resilient our organization is overall to these types of scams.”
The campaign may be as simple as copying a previously sent scam email and sending it to SMSD faculty to prompt a response — the results will notify the district of where its weak points may be. The district tries to prevent any scamming with an additional two-factor authentication and VPN usage by faculty working from home. Filters on the emails can sort out the obvious scams as well, yet there are still outliers.
However, most online hoaxes stem from large agencies or businesses both inside and outside of the U.S., Lane said. These fraudsters can be just as hard to identify as Faulkner’s likely one-man band of a scam, because of user-privacy agreements within the social media apps.
Despite all the precautions taken, banks notified and accounts reported, students will never truly be safe from online scams because one can only do so much to prevent them, according to Lane. It’s important to stay level-headed and aware of the prevalence of cybersecurity threats.
Social media accounts may look legit, but Faulkner believes students’ guards should always be up.
“Usually, you can tell it’s a catfish if they have only 40 followers, but they had more than me and more comments than me and more likes than me,” said Faulkner. “It really looked like I was catfishing. I was like, ‘this is just really getting out of hand.’”
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