Who is Genai Powers? If you’re my age, your first instinct will be to look her up on MySpace. There, you’ll find the profile of a 17-year-old girl who goes by “Geezie.” Her profile page flashes with a rainbow star background and it blasts her current favorite song, “That’s Not My Name” by the Ting Tings.

Then there’s the MySpace profile of the other 17-year-old Genai Powers. It’s a plain, no-frills site—just a couple of photos of Genai and a bio that describes her as… a skank?

“Yes, a skank!” says the real Genai Powers, who found out about the faker site when someone she barely knew sent her a message about it through MySpace. “It said ho, slut, skank and that I have sex for free.”

The photos on the two profiles are the same. So even if you knew Genai in real life, you might not know if her online personality was a Ting Tings fan or a tramp.

“My immediate reaction was my mouth dropped,” says Genai. “I don’t know who made the page. I just know it was a hater.”

And it’s not just haters who will steal your photo to make a fake profile. I talked to 19-year-old Holly Daniels, an aspiring model in Austin, Tex., whose picture was used to create a virtual MySpace girlfriend for a guy she never met.

“I found out because people thought that was my boyfriend,” Holly says. “He put me in his top friends and then would write comments back and forth, so it looked like he was talking to me. And it was really him talking to himself, saying I love you. It’s kind of creepy.”

Holly wrote to MySpace to get the profile shut down. Turns out, this happens a lot—“how to stop imposter profiles” is one of the site’s Top 6 Questions from users. A MySpace administrator told her to send a proof pic, a photo of herself holding a card with her real web address on it.

To keep from being copied again, Holly now watermarks all her new photos this way. So do lots of other teenagers. To the point where it seems like MySpace is covered in proof pics.

And the thing is, they don’t even work anymore. As soon as people started posting proof pics, determined fakers learned how to edit out watermarks using Photoshop. So to be safe, teens like Holly are making proof videos.

“Because anyone can type,” she says. “If you can get behind a video camera and really talk to people, they can actually see it's you.”

And of course now these proof videos are popping up everywhere. Even guys have them. Like one from Mark Williams, a young rapper in Phoenix, Ariz., who looks into the camera and boasts about being the one and only while his music plays in thumps in the background.

“Hey, what up, ya’ll. I’m here to talk about my MySpace fakes. I’ve seen, like, five or six pages that I know of that have pictures of me that ain’t me. And they’re trying to play off like they’re the shit, because they’re me. Ha!”

You can tell from his video that this guy isn’t really afraid of someone stealing his photos. It’s more like he’s proud of it, like his proof pics and videos are status symbols that let the world know “someone wants to be me!”

Even Genai is actually embracing the fact that someone stole her online identity.

“I’m kind of big-headed about it, I'm not going to lie,” Genia says. “I don't know how to explain it. My friend, when she puts her ID on her pictures, she says, ‘Don’t steal this!’ or ‘You can't be me!’ So I guess it kind of fills up people's heads.”

As for myself, I recently deleted my MySpace account to prevent fakers from trying to copy-and-paste my life. Maybe it’s an extreme move. But like most kids my age, trying to figure out who I am in real life—at home and at school—is pressure enough. Plus, it gives me more time to update my Facebook account.
 

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