'My whole identity was stolen in seconds': Londoners speak out on the spread of duplicate image abuse

A 34-year-old teaching assistant from Lewisham discovered her photograph had been copied, altered, and distributed across at least four separate online forums before she even knew it had happened. She is not alone. Across London, a growing number of residents — predominantly women, but not exclusively — are confronting the psychological and professional wreckage left by the unauthorised duplication and redistribution of their personal images online, and many say they are getting almost no help when they report it.

The issue has sharpened in urgency following the Online Safety Act 2023, which created new criminal offences around non-consensual intimate image sharing, but community advocates working in Southwark and Tower Hamlets say the legislation has not translated into meaningful enforcement at street level. The gap between what the law promises and what victims actually experience is, by many accounts, considerable.

What communities are experiencing

At the Brent-based digital rights support group Sisterhood Online — which operates drop-in sessions at Willesden Green Library every other Thursday — caseworkers say referrals related to image duplication increased sharply in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025. The organisation, which does not publish aggregate data publicly, describes the profile of people seeking help as increasingly diverse: school leavers, middle-aged professionals, and older residents who use social media to stay connected with family abroad.

In Hackney, the Shoreditch Trust has fielded similar concerns through its digital wellbeing programme, which launched in September 2024 to help residents navigate online harms. Staff there describe a recurring pattern: a person's image is scraped from a public-facing account, duplicated into artificial or manipulated content, and then spread across platforms. By the time a victim becomes aware, the material has often been reshared dozens of times. Takedown requests to major platforms can take weeks, and in some cases the content resurfaces on mirror sites almost immediately after removal.

One Peckham resident, a 27-year-old who works in retail and asked not to be named, described contacting her local policing team at Peckham Police Station on Queens Road in March 2026. She said she was advised to report the incident via an online portal rather than speak to an officer in person, and that she received no follow-up contact for six weeks. She has since connected with a volunteer legal clinic operating out of Bermondsey, which helped her file a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office under the UK GDPR.

The enforcement gap

The Online Safety Act places obligations on platforms with more than three million UK users to act swiftly on reports of non-consensual intimate images. Ofcom, the regulator responsible for enforcement, published its first set of platform compliance guidance in early 2025. However, digital rights researchers have noted that the complaint resolution windows written into platform codes of practice remain vague in practice, with no hard statutory deadline shorter than 24 hours applying to the most severe categories of content.

Legal aid availability compounds the problem. A person seeking civil remedies for image-based abuse in England and Wales must generally self-fund unless they qualify for means-tested support, and with civil legal aid thresholds unchanged since 2013 in real terms, many working Londoners fall into a gap where they earn too much to qualify but cannot afford private solicitors charging upward of £250 an hour in central London.

Advocacy groups are urging the government to amend the Criminal Justice Bill currently before the House of Lords to include a mandatory 48-hour platform takedown requirement for verified duplicate image abuse, mirroring provisions already adopted in Scotland under the Intimate Images (Scotland) Act 2023.

For anyone in London who believes they are affected, the Revenge Porn Helpline — reachable at 0345 6000 459 — provides free case management support and can liaise directly with major platforms on a victim's behalf. The Internet Watch Foundation also accepts reports at iwf.org.uk. Those seeking face-to-face support in the capital can contact the Shoreditch Trust's digital wellbeing team or attend one of Sisterhood Online's Willesden Green drop-ins, where a trained caseworker can advise on next steps without requiring a formal police report first.