How can someone create a fake account in my daughter’s name?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #58, I look at a case of impersonation online and the difficulties involved in tracing down the culprits.

Stopping fake accounts?

How do you stop this? Well, you don’t.

The practical situation here is that there’s really almost nothing you can
do to stop this from happening. People can go out and create email accounts
using whatever name they might want to. They might be trying to intentionally
look like your daughter; they might just coincidentally have the same name.

I realize that, in this case. it’s not that likely that it’s a coincidence –
but it is nonetheless a possibility that people can create email addresses
using just about any email name and make it look like anybody they want to.

Legal issues

Is it legal?

You know, I honestly don’t know.

Probably it’s not legal, but the question is then how do you enforce that?
The short answer is once again, pragmatically, you can’t.

As you’ve noticed, it’s coming from overseas. The fact is it may not be
illegal in that country. I just don’t know. Even if it is, you’re asking for
multiple law enforcement agencies to potentially get involved in something that
boils down to a simple of case of impersonation.

Not to say that they have better things to do, but they definitely have a
lot to do, and this is not one of the items that I would suspect would rank
very highly on their list of priorities. So even if it is illegal, which I
suspect it is, the chances, the pragmatic chances of it actually getting
enforced and traced back to somebody are just not very realistic. It’s just
going to be too expensive for everybody involved to figure this out and track
it down.

The best thing you can do is (to the extent that you can) ignore it. To the
extent that you need to, let people know that this account is not your
daughter; and basically keep an eye out and move on.