A woman who had a fake Instagram set up in her name has said not knowing who was behind it drove her “berserk”. 

In 2017, Aoife Howard Ring started a new job and was invited out to lunch with one of her new colleagues. 

At that point Ms Howard Ring used her account to post mostly “mundane” stuff about her life and asked to swap Instagram handles with one woman. 

“One of the girls I work with went to add me and said, ‘Oh, is this your account?’” she recalled on Moncreiff. 

“I looked at it and had to take a double take because it was my name and it was my picture but it wasn’t my profile picture that I have and it wasn’t a handle that I had. 

“I was a bit confused.” 

Her new colleague requested to follow the fake account but was not accepted. 

“She took a screenshot and sent it to me,” Ms Howard Ring said. 

“I could see that the person I was working with and this fake account had someone in common - which was this Makeup Academy in Cork City. 

“I was becoming a little bit upset because I could see that they had over 100 posts as me.

“In a moment of madness, I drove into the Makeup Academy a couple of weeks later and I explained myself to this poor creatur behind the counter.” 

A member of staff logged into the academy’s Instagram account and allowed her to look through the fake profile’s posts. 

It turned out the account was reposting her photos with different captions.

“They had a countdown to my wedding as me, they wished my husband a happy 30th birthday and a collage of photos of us together,” Ms Howard Ring said. 

“They had a three month anniversary post.” 

'It just went dark'

Most of it was fairly ordinary stuff but Ms Howard Ring soon realised there was a “dark side to it” as well, with the account having liked a number of inappropriate posts about women. 

In her quest to get the account deleted, Ms Howard Ring contacted Gardaí who were “very nice” and Instagram from whom she got “no satisfaction” out of at all.  

In the end, Ms Howard Ring sent the account a sternly worded DM, asking for whoever had created it to delete it permanently. 

“It just went dark within about three minutes, the account went unavailable and who knows,” she said. 

“But there’s nothing to say they wouldn’t do it again.” 

To this day, Ms Howard Ring has no idea who was behind it.

You can listen back here:

Main image: Picture by the fake IG account of Aoife Howard Ring. Image: Supplied.