So, I understand that some people can have the same name, but this isn’t the case with my husband. My husband’s name is so unusually spelled that he was the only person, besides his biological father, who had that first and last name combination on a birth certificate. This is a fact that he shared with me when we first started dating. He seemed pretty proud of that, and I always thought it was funny. After I married him, and changed my last name to his, I became the only woman in America that had my first and last name on record. It’s just that odd of a last name, so please trust me on this one when I say that someone is using his name.
The profile on instagram, that I just discovered, displays a profile picture of an older man, standing, or sitting, beside a woman of about the same age. I wanted to report it to instagram, but there wasn’t an option to report the possibility of a spouse’s stolen identity. It is definitely not my husband’s account. The friends listed in the pages he follows, are not any names that I recognize from his group of friends. He would never lose contact with some of his closest friends.
I am worried.
It would be illegal to log into someone else’s email account without the permission of that person. If someone used another person’s email account to make an instagram in that person’s name, then he or she would need to log into that email account to access the verification link. As soon as he or she logs into the email account, without permission, he or she is breaking the law.
Yes, accessing the email account without authorisation would be prosecutable under the CFAA, but you assume that the Instagram account cannot be used at all without accessing the email account to get the verification code. This is not true. Simply creating the account does not require the verification code, and limited functionality is available if you log in to an unverified account even without completing the verification. Of course the application will hound you to verify your email until you do it, but it’s not immediately necessary.