I found a video clip of him at a conference, reading out a chapter I’d written. He was dressed like me. He had even copied my tattoos

I’ve been an academic since 2013. I am a senior lecturer in art history, and director of US studies at the University of Essex. What drove me towards an academic career was my interest in tattooing. There is a very small group of tattoo historians in academia, so we all know one another well.

In November 2017, Anna Friedman, a Chicago-based academic with a similar specialism, contacted me. She had received a like on Instagram from an account she thought was interesting. Clicking on the profile, she saw it was a duplicate of her page and that the guy had also made a copy of her website, including her very specific biography, but under his own name. When she looked at his profile on academia.edu, she instantly realised that his bio was a copy of mine; the papers he’d supposedly written were actually by me. He’d claimed to have given talks that I, or others in our academic circle, had given. Anna messaged me asking if I knew who this person was, but I had no idea.

We started digging around, and things quickly became unsettling. I found a video clip of him at a conference, reading a chapter I’d written. He was dressed like me. Even his mannerisms and speech patterns were similar. Then I came across a picture of his hands, where he’d poorly copied my tattoos: the flowers on the backs of my hands, with the words “know more” and “artefact” written across the fingers. This man had been stealing my work and elements of my identity for years. It creeped me out.