Earlier this year, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa became Twitter’s arch-nemesis and sued them for trademark infringement, cyber squatting and misappropriation of his name and likeness. This incident became the impetus for Twitter’s creation of “verified accounts,†which helps to keep celebrities from falling prey to social media identity theft on Twitter.
Unfortunately, a few other athletes and corporate entities have still not learned from this incident and others listed within this website.
As of late, fake Twitter accounts were created for the following members of the Washington Capitals hockey team:
- Jeff Schultz
- Brooks Laich
- José Theodore
- Alexander Semin
More obscure was the lawsuit filed and dropped by Oneok Inc., a natural gas distributor that sued Twitter for trademark infringement. The lawsuit claimed that Twitter had allowed an anonymous user to use the user name ONEOK, their company’s trademark. The suit has since been dropped because Twitter closed the fake accounts.
The hockey players and Oneok aren’t as well known as: actor Christopher Walken, celebrity chef Chef Gordon Ramsey, Britney Spears, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the Dalai Lama and even the Queen of England and Former President George W. Bush, but they were earlier victims of this phenomenon who have received international acclaim for their victim hood status. Some of these fake accounts had well in excess of 10,000 followers.
One has to wonder who’s more susceptible to cyber squatting and social media identity theft—athletes, celebrity chefs, natural gas distributors or you—the answer is all of the above.
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