Creepy Scammer Who Stole Baby Photos From Instagram Banned From Social Media

Parenting in the age of social media is a minefield nobody adequately prepared us for. It’s difficult to know how much to share, what platforms are safe, and who to trust. It’s a different world out there than when we were small, and people are using social media to do utterly insane things like stealing baby photos to scam people out of money.

According to The Telegraph, that’s what 21-year-old Kati Ringer was doing out of her mom’s house in Norwich, England, for the past few months.

The amateur scam artist went on Instagram and found people posting pictures of babies. Then she copied the photos and posted them on her own Facebook and Instagram accounts, claiming they were her poor, sick, dying babies to get sympathetic people to give her money for medical treatments and funerals.

The mothers found their baby photos on Ringer’s sites.

Ringer actually got caught by the women whose baby pictures she was stealing. When they told her to stop posting photos of their children and saying they were dying, she started harassing and threatening them.

She told the first victim that she’d come to her house and rape and kill her baby. She laughed at the woman and said that she’d just told her followers the baby died, and she’d gotten £600 for the funeral so far. Then she started Photoshopping penises onto the baby’s pictures and sent them back to the mother.

She did the same sort of thing to the second victim, a woman with a premature baby.

She did not seem to realize she could get in trouble for running a sick baby scam on Facebook

Ringer didn’t seem to think there could be any repercussions for this. But police tracked her IP address to her mother’s house. They arrested her for malicious communications offenses, and Ringer pleaded guilty.

The judge’s sentence bars Ringer from using any social media for two  years. She’s also not allowed to pass off other people’s photos as her own. The judge also barred her from seeking donations, unless as an authorized representative of a registered charity.

Ringer got a 30-week suspended sentence, £225 in court costs, and 30 days of community service. She’ll be 23 before she’s allowed back on Instagram again. Hopefully she won’t have come up with any more creepy scams by then.

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(Image: iStockPhoto / grinvalds)

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