Who was the person targetting women for explicit photos? (Picture: Getty)
‘Rest in peace angel’ the video caption read.
Below, a picture of a pretty young woman followed by a heartbroken statement from her sister:
‘im trying to keep jasleens account active by posting vids and pics on a daily just to remind loved ones and friends such as yourseles that shes still in our hearts, i would also prefer there wasnt any fake rumours going around as my parents have lost a daughter due to a car accident. i I hope this helps you reflect on your loved ones as time is precious [sic]’.
Scanning the post, which had been viewed by 50,000 users, Yasmine felt sick. She knew the young woman in the picture. It was Jasleen, her friend. They chatted practically every day via TikTok and Instagram messenger.
It was a devastating way to find out her friend had died, Yasmine, who is going by a pseudonym to protect her identity, tells Metro.co.uk. ‘It really f****d me up to be honest,’ she admits. ‘I didn’t leave my home for weeks, thinking anyone can just die.’
Desperate to connect with someone who also knew Jasleen, Yasmine contacted those who’d posted under the video, asking for funeral details to pay her respects.
Then things got strange.
The post from ‘Jasleen’s sister’ announcing her death (Picture:TikTok)
It was in July 2022 when Jasleen and Yasmin’s friendship blossomed. Both OnlyFans models, Yasmine couldn’t believe it when this beautiful stranger going by then name of Jasleen Dosanjh, with almost 10,000 followers, liked one of her Instagram pictures.
‘I thought she was so pretty,’ recalls Yasmine, 20. ‘I didn’t think any woman could look like her.’
So, she messaged her back and from there they struck up a friendship, where Jasleen revealed she was a 21-year-old Londoner, about to move to Florida.
Although Yasmine had a boyfriend, Jasleen made it very clear she was gay – and interested in her new friend.
‘At first it was flattering, a real ego-boost,’ explains Yasmine. ‘But then it got to the point where there was no conversation. It felt like sexting.’
Jasleen would often talk about them collaborating on OnlyFans content together and forwarded revealing videos she had filmed, pressuring Yasmine to send the same back. ‘She made me feel as if I owed her pictures,’she recalls.
Jasleen and Yasmin messaged almost every day
Even so, Yasmine valued their friendship and was keen to take it offline. Once, she tried to video called Jasleen, but it didn’t work out. It was late, she told Yasmine, her parents were strict and she was with her sister.
It was four months after the pair met, that Yasmine discovered the shocking news that her beautiful friend had died suddenly.
As she reached out to those who knew her, three women responded.
Soon the trio realised that none of them had met Jasleen in person. No-one had received any FaceTimes, live photos or calls. All of them had heard variations on the story about Jasleen living in London and moving to Florida – and all had been pressured to exchange revealing pictures and videos.
THE GROUP CHAT
Curious, the girls formed a group chat to investigate their ‘friend’. Among them was Charlotte, 23, from Warrington, who had been messaging with Jasleen over TikTok from August until November 2022.
‘What I realised afterwards was, nothing went into detail,’ she reflects. ‘I can’t even remember what job she had. Around the same time she told me she was in Bali, she was telling Yasmine she was in Florida.’
Jasleen’s Instagram account had nearly 10,000 followers (Picture: Instagram)
When Jasleen began demanding nudes, Charlotte refused – and when she got the news in November about her sudden death, she was sceptical. ‘I was searching fatal crashes in London, and nothing was coming up,’ she explains.
The group pored through Jasleen’s following lists and found a network of dubious accounts.
Of particular interest was a Saneeta Kaur whose TikTok bio contained the same Sikh Khanda symbol that Jasleen’s had carried, and who used markedly similar hashtags. However, it’s thought that the girl in the pictures is a Canadian student, who goes by a totally different name. Meanwhile, a Simran Dhillon had been tagged in Jasleen’s Instagram stories, yet her account had no friends nor followers.
When the girls confronted Jasleen via TikTok and Instagram, she blocked them.
‘Blocked from beyond the grave?’ chuckles Yasmine, ‘That’s some Wi-Fi signal down there!’
Meanwhile, trawling through social media, Charlotte discovered a young woman called ‘Jasminx’, who looked identical to Jasleen, and whose followers were asking if she was dead.
This girl was also an OnlyFans model, but her real name was Jasmin Singh, and she lived in New Zealand.
‘Jasleen’ had stolen her pictures from an OnlyFans model called Jasmin from New Zealand (Twitter/TikTok)
THE REAL GIRL
Metro spoke to Jasmin, 22, about her likeness being stolen. ‘I like to say I’m nineteen for OnlyFans, but I guess for the article I can’t lie,’ she joked over the phone.
Jasmin has made a lot of money selling exclusive content via OnlyFans, and has accumulated millions of combined followers across all social media. Her identity, however, is endlessly misappropriated by romance fraudsters and catfish. Victims message her daily, believing they have been giving her money, or paying her rent. One even bought her an engagement ring.
Nevertheless, Jasmin remembers Jasleen Dosanjh. ‘No matter how many times I reported them, the account never got deleted,’ she told us. ‘Platforms make it way too f*****g easy to make catfish accounts.’
The ‘real girl’ Jasmin Singh whose pictures were stolen by the catfish (Instagram)
THE IMPOSTER
Although Yasmine and Charlotte were blocked by the imposter who stole Jasmin’s pictures, Instagram’s ‘About This Account’ feature reveals that ‘Jasleen Dosanjh’ was based in the United Kingdom, not Florida, and this particular profile was created in December 2021. It had 750 followers, mostly females aged between 18 and 22, many of them lesbian or bisexual. A number of followers also had OnlyFans accounts, or were unshy about uploading risqué content.
It is not known if Jasleen Dosanjh is the catfish’s real name or a pseudonym.
Elsewhere, a LinkTree for Jasleen also revealed a Twitter page that had been suspended, and a YouTube channel that was created on 27 June 2022 and contained one Short (stolen) video of Jasmin posing in lingerie.
Other searches reveal a Snapchat, and a Facebook for ‘Jasleen Kaur Dosanjh.’
Yasmin and Charlotte did a lot of digging to find out who the real Jasleen was (Instagram)
As with the other accounts, the pictures on this Facebook were lifted from Jasmin; information in the profile matched the backstory that the imposter gave, ‘Lives in Miami, Florida… From London.’
After we contacted some of Jasleen’s followers many reported the same story. She had told them she had lived in London then moved to Florida; that she was lesbian; that she was a cam girl who would love to ‘collab;’ and in all cases she had offered to swap nudes.
INTRODUCING PREET GARCIA
Months after Yasmine and Charlotte discovered the scam, a new picture was spotted on Instagram, with some familiar hashtags.
Just before Jasleen’s ‘death’, a profile for a woman called Preet Garcia was created, which targeted attractive young women for indecent pictures (TikTok/Instagram)
This time the profile belonged to a ‘Preet Garcia,’, someone Metro had previously messaged requesting information about Jasleen. According to her bio, Preet was half-Indian, half-Mexican, and lived in Spain. However, the profile was based in the United Kingdom, and had been created in October 2022 – just one month before Jasleen’s untimely ‘death’.
Preet’s posts all contained the same brown-skinned girl, and as with Jasleen, her Instagram page featured plenty of recent comments saying how ‘stunning’ or ‘unreal’ she looked, from legitimate accounts belonging to young women.
When Metro contacted some of them, you can guess what happened next: After being befriended, they had been sent some indecent pictures and asked for some back – except this time it was coming from Preet rather than Jasleen. (Although, more than one recalled being asked for pictures by both.)
In another twist, the saved link to Jasleen Kaur Dosanjh’s Facebook page, now leads to a profile with blacked out photos, which has been renamed: ‘Preet Garcia.’ Unsurprisingly Jasleen’s YouTube channel has also been renamed ‘Preet Garcia’ and given a profile picture featuring the new model.
EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE SCAM
Article author Harrison Kelly explains:
I was introduced to Yasmine because I used to be a producer on MTV Catfish UK. It’s a straightforward television show, derived from the documentary, in which a person believes that they are being romantically deceived by an online imposter (or “Catfish”), so enlists the TV show to investigate, normally ending in a confrontation with the imposter, who is usually someone they vaguely know. However, catfishing itself is often undertaken for criminal reasons, including sexual offences, romance fraud, harassment and extortion.
One thing that makes ‘Jasleen’s’ story intriguing is quite how many of these criminal boundaries have been crossed. Another is that it has been going on for so many years. (Online, the earliest accessible mentions of a fake account called @jasleenxdosanjh18 appear on a tattle.life forum from 12 October 2021, while some of the imposter’s older profiles that Yasmine and Charlotte discovered, such as @simranxdhillon, were created in 2017.)
So who is the imposter? The messages shown to me, alongside the use of emerging social media platforms, would support that the imposter is younger than 30; the prevalence of accounts with names like Jasleen Dosanjh, Preet Garcia, Saneeta Kaur and Gurdith Singh – and the accounts they follow, which range from Indian micro-influencers to Western celebrities – indicate a British Sikh; and wronged parties who engaged with the imposter believed they seemed familiar enough with London to live there or nearby.
However, without any personal details to verify an identity against, I cannot say much with confidence. This imposter may have mental health issues, or a closeted sexuality. It’s possible that they are an older male, or group of offenders.
The only thing I know for sure is that it is never advisable to share anything with anybody you have not met in real life.
Much like Jasleen, Preet also requires LinkTree to keep track of her many online accounts, which include TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest and – keeping with the times – Threads. (Fittingly, one of her first Threads was in response to a post by Jasmin in New Zealand.)
There were also links to profiles on Reddit and X, both of which were littered with pornographic images and videos featuring the same girl from the social media accounts. Moreover, this content promotes a series of paid-subscription-only sites where she sold ‘exclusive content’ for $9-10 per month.
‘Preet Garcia’ made money from adult subscription sites (Picture FansmIne)
THE SECOND REAL GIRL
The young Italian woman whose photos had been stolen by the imposter to create “Preet Garcia” did not respond to requests for comment. However, the pornographic material that the imposter was reappropriating appears to have been solicited or stolen from the woman’s private subscription-based accounts.
Sadly, Jasmin, Yasmine, Charlotte and all the other girls duped by this imposter might never find out who is behind this lurid web of lies.
Although attempts have been made to contact the imposter through more than 50 suspected social media accounts, their response is to ignore and block. (Metro has since received hundreds of security alerts that an unknown user had attempted to install a phishing scam via TikTok Messenger.)
The pictures for this account were taken from the private subscription-based account of a young woman in Italy (Picture: Yubo/Wizz)
The fraudulent OnlyFans account for “Preet Garcia” was removed soon after it was discovered. A second account was subsequently set up, then also removed. OnlyFans responded to questions from Metro with the following statement: ‘Our Terms of Service make it clear that creators must own/or have the rights to the copyright of any media they choose to post on OnlyFans. […] In line with these processes, in the cases you highlighted the content was deactivated and the creator was banned from the platform.’
Nevertheless, fake accounts for both Jasleen and Preet remain across social media, and the imposter continues to make money out of stolen material via a range of other private platforms, including Fansly, Fansmine, Passes, a Premium Discord Server, and a private Telegram channel.
‘It’s such a violation! It feels like s**t because someone else is taking your work,’ Jasmin yells down the phone, when we tell her about the imposter’s subscription scam. ‘There needs to be way more regulation. No one should be able to go on OnlyFans and use your content.’
The catfish made up several accounts using the same name and Jasmin’s pictures
THE FINAL TWIST
Soon after our call, Jasmin checks her Instagram inbox and discovers a series of picture messages from none other than ‘Preet Garcia.’
Bizarrely, these contain screenshots of fake accounts, along with messages that read ‘Catfishing as u [sic]’ and ‘Fake acc taking ur TikTok and posts [sic].’
It seems as though the imposter is reporting other imposters, in the hope of winning some special trust or access to Jasmin.
Ironically, the catfish alerted Jasmin to other accounts who were pretending to be her (Instagram/Jasmin Singh)
But for what? Perhaps to befriend her. Possibly to start an online relationship. Or maybe, one can only presume, to continue their quest for naked pictures.
As for Yasmine and Charlotte, both are disappointed that they may never find out who befriended them as Jasleen Dosanjh.
Yasmine in particular describes herself as ‘mind blown’ by the experience.
‘I had lost two people in my family and I had something traumatic where someone nearly died, and I felt like everyone around me was dying so I didn’t leave my house much at all for a year. […] I was afraid in case something happened to me as well,’ she says.
Even so, Yasmine still occasionally checks the imposter’s many fake TikTok or Instagram accounts, and notices that a name or a profile picture has changed.
She also understands that what happened to her was a criminal offence, but admits she didn’t bother reporting it as she didn’t expect they would be much help.
However, she thinks it is important to tell the story. ‘(If only) to warn people about the dangers of catfishing and the mental health side of it.
‘It affected my mental health massively,’ she adds. ‘Whoever this person is, they need to stop tricking other young girls into sending pictures.’