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Brain surgeon's identity stolen for Facebook slur on gold medallist
Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter14 Aug 2008
Britain's leading female brain surgeon told today how she had her identity stolen on Facebook.
Fraudsters opened an entry under the name of Helen Fernandes, a consultant neurosurgeon at one of the country's top hospitals.
They used her photograph to lend credibility to the page and then posted comments attacking Britain's new Olympic swimming champion Rebecca Adlington.
The surgeon has no link with the 19-year-old sportswoman and is baffled as to why her name was used for the character assassination.
Ms Fernandes, a surgeon at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, told the Evening Standard: "It certainly had me rattled. It is very worrying, especially when it makes people look professionally culpable. It is an area where I should not be discussing these matters in public at all.
"I didn't even understand what Facebook was until I received a call alerting me about the fraud. If it were a little bit closer to home - say it was a posting relating to a patient I had treated, it would have been even more worrying."
The page was set up on Sunday night while the surgeon was on holiday with her family in Italy.
By the following afternoon, hours after Adlington took gold in the 400m freestyle, a Facebook group had been set up, purportedly by Ms Fernandes, under a defamatory heading. Mispelling the word "slum", the untrue internet posting stated: " How can a genuine Olympic champion come from the mega-slun [sic] that is Mansfield?
"Come on, GB is a third rate nation when it comes to sport. And we are nation run by utter incompetents. The truth is out there. Helen Fernandes, consultant neurosurgeon, Cambridge."
Facebook admitted the account was false and has taken down the offending page. A spokesman said today: "Facebook does not condone content that it deems to be abusive or defamatory. After investigating the profile for Helen Fernandes, we found that it was a fake and removed it from the site." The ease with which a homepage was set up under Ms Fernandes's name will alarm Facebook. It would appear anybody can set up an account without any means to check its authenticity. Facebook employs a team to search out abuses among its 90 million users.
Why Ms Fernandes was targeted is a mystery. The 41-year-old motherof-three, who lives in Barrington, near Cambridge, is one of only a handful of female neurosurgeons in Britain. She has been awarded grants to carry out medical research and has had work published in the Lancet. She was appointed a consultant neurosurgeon at Addenbrooke's in 2002.
Policing Facebook may prove harder as it gets ever popular. Last month a company boss was awarded £22,000 at the High Court over fake entries, in what was thought to be the first successful privacy and defamation case involving the social networking site in Britain.
The false and defamatory profile of Matthew Firscht, 38, was created in June last year.
