Did I ever tell you all about my academic stalker? Not a romantic story, but a catfish nonetheless. I'm an academic. The short version of a much longer story is that three or four years ago, I was catfished by a graduate student in another country,

who (amongst other things) used a variety of fake identities to get me to send him unpublished research, which he then submitted as his own for his degree, and presented at conferences. I have a video of him dressed as me, reading out a book chapter I wrote at a conference.

He had taken the text of my biography, spliced it with a friend of mine's, and used it all over the internet. He also dressed like me, posed for photos matched to ones of me, told people he had done things that I'd done, and most scarily of all, copied my hand tattoos exactly.

He made a dumb opsec mistake which ended up alerting someone I knew to what he was up to, so we reported him to his supervisors with a portfolio of evidence showing the lengths he'd gone to.

They were shocked, because as far as they were concerned, he was a brilliant student working far, far above the usual level. Given that he was basically submitting publishable work for his Master's degree, he had really made a reputation for himself.

He had won prizes and scholarships on the back of my and other people's work, and was working as a TA at a pretty decent institution. It turned out that he'd never submitted a single word of his own writing,

and every piece of work he'd submitted for assessment was cleverly lifted from me and lots of my friends who work in similar areas of research. Last I heard, they were kicking him out and looking back at his undergraduate studies in more detail too.

I've not heard from him since -- at least, not to my knowledge.

His hand. My hand.

I was rather pleased to hear that a magazine article I wrote, to which he added footnotes and submitted as part of his graduate degree, was marked at 80%. Still got it, baby.

Though if you're going to catfish an academic, you should probably pick someone more prestigious and more productive than me.

This is him, dressed as me, reading out something I wrote at a conference and pretending it's his own work.

There's more but it becomes identifying so I won't share but trust me when I say this is just the surface.

An article I wrote for a magazine, to which he took the trouble of adding footnotes before submitting as his own work.

This is where it all began. Following contacts over many years were from a variety of pseudonyms. This guy built a decent grad school reputation after this, on the back of my and others' work, and he almost got away with it.

"Judy Keith", by the way, is also him.

Some internet sleuthing suggested that he may have had prior convictions for identity theft or similar, but I never pursued it and was happy to leave it all behind.

It was his stealing of @tattoohistorian's entire website and Instagram page that got him caught in the first place. He stole her work and her bio too. https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350201485104189440?s=19

He even created an http://academia.edu  page which used a version of my bio alongside titles of papers by me, @tattoohistorian @Gemma_Angel and others.

We even found some old bulletin board drama about the same guy, though never confirmed it...

At the end of it all, he uploaded a screenshot of Citizen Kane and then changed his profile picture to this genuinely creepy mask thing.