Question from Susan:  Hi Rick. I have a really serious problem and I’m hoping you can help me solve it.

I’m a singer and I have a pretty sizable following in my local (parts of 5 states) region. You probably wouldn’t recognize my name if you heard it but most of the people in my region would.

Anyway, I use my Twitter account to keep my followers up to date on where I’ll be performing, when I’ll be releasing a new CD and other such “news”.

As of this morning I have approximately 36,000 followers.

The problem I’m having is someone has opened a fake Twitter account using my name and photo and they’ve been using that account to spread false announcements concerning me.

For example, just last week they said I was going to be singing at a county fair about an hour away in a neighboring state. I found out that at least 20 of my fans saw that post and drove long distances from their homes to see me at that fair.

Needless to say they were really upset when they found out I wasn’t there.

And they’re doing other things too like posting nasty things and getting my fans upset. I’ve actually lost several hundred followers on my real Twitter account because of some of the things that were posted on the fake one.

I don’t know why this person is doing this but it’s caused me a lot of heartache. My question is how can I report this fake account to Twitter and (hopefully) have them to remove it. I’ve tried just ignoring the other account but now I realize that I can’t.

Rick’s answer:   [Read more…]