Catfishing: How I hunted down the gang impersonating me online

James hopes the documentary will raise awareness that anyone experienced or not online can fall victim to scams

James Blake, an entrepreneur and owner of a digital marketing agency, happily admits that he spends his life online 24/7.

But he learned first-hand about the dark side of the web and how even things we understand well can turn our lives - and our identity - upside down.

His story of scam artists and impersonation has been turned into a documentary for BBC Northern Ireland - Hunting The Catfish Crime Gang. Below he talks about his journey to making the film.

James travelled far and wide to find out what happened to his stolen identity

I eat, sleep and breathe digital. It's the connectivity; the immediacy and international business possibilities of social media that I love.

But a couple of years ago my relationship with the internet changed forever.

I received a message to say someone had come across a fake account of mine - it had my name and my face. But it wasn't me.

I thought it was amusing at first but, slowly, more and more of these impersonator accounts kept popping up.

Soon there were complex profiles, using all my images with thousands of followers.

They had pictures of my car, my friends, my family, our offices and my team.

'Dating me for six months'

But things were to get worse. Soon after, I received messages from people who had been scammed and lost money.

Every day I would wake up to three or four messages from women who were supposedly dating me.

One woman said she had been seeing me for six months after we met online; a couple of women contacted me saying they had lost £1,000 and one even said she had lost £50,000.

I started to worry because it was getting out of control.

It's not as simple as reporting scammers online, as James found out

I'd been reporting the fake profiles to the platforms and doing everything I could to take them down but it wasn't stopping.

I wanted to find out more about how this can happen and how to bring it to an end, for good.

This documentary - Hunting the Catfish Crime Gang - made that possible.

Meeting the victims

During filming, I met some of the women who have been in contact with accounts using my pictures.

I don't get nervous very often, but when I went to the park to meet one of the victims I was really anxious - I was well aware of the impact this would have had on their life.

I sat with a scam interceptor as a live telephone scam took place and thankfully the elderly lady on the other side of the phone was warned before she lost anything. It really was something to hear the relief in her voice that she was okay.

James said the scammers can also be victims that have been trafficked into the operations

My journey took me all the way to Thailand to see the giant complexes that exist to facilitate these scams - I was blown away by how sophisticated the whole operation is.

There's millions of pounds invested into the infrastructure of these operations.

I imagined these people operating out of a shack somewhere that barely has internet, not somewhere that wouldn't look out of place in Canary Wharf.

I also discovered that those involved in the scams are themselves often victims - trafficked into these compounds with no choice but to carry out the demands of those in charge.

James' entire life is online but when scammers started using his identity, he took matters into his own hands

I hope the documentary will open people's eyes to what's going on - the horrific reality is that there is a hierarchy of victims involved.

Once you watch the film, I don't think a single person will be able to look at a fake profile the same way again.

I also hope it helps raise awareness to these scams so that people are more alert to the dangers online.

Anybody could become a victim to this and the shame needs to be eradicated because the more people who come forward and share their story, the closer we get to stopping it.

Hunting The Catfish Crime Gang will be on BBC Three on Monday 23 October at 21:00 BST and BBC One/BBC One NI on Tuesday 24 October at 22:40.