CeCe Rose has a problem most creators would envy on paper: too many people want to be her. According to the New York Post‘s Sonya Gugliara, the 27-year-old OnlyFans star calls herself the “most catfished woman on the internet,” and she now pays security teams whose whole job is finding and taking down accounts that pretend to be her.

371 fakes in one sweep

Rose, who has more than 2.2 million Instagram followers and says she makes millions a year on OnlyFans, told the Post the impersonation has gotten out of hand. “It’s gotten so bad, to the point that just the other day, my team found 371 fake accounts,” she said.

She said every creator deals with some fakes, but nobody in her circle sees anything close to her numbers.

How the scam works

Rose said she first noticed it in 2023, when an angry fan messaged her on OnlyFans accusing her of taking his money and then ghosting him. Digging in, she found a wave of accounts using her photos and videos to pull fans off Instagram and TikTok and onto messaging apps like Telegram, Zangi and WhatsApp.

Once there, the fakes play the long game. Rose told the Post she has heard from people who believed they were in a serious relationship with “her,” including some who thought they were going to meet or build a future together.

The money lost is real. One fan told her he lost $80,000 to an impersonator. “He drained his bank account trying to support ‘my ambitions,'” she said, meaning whatever story the scammer was feeding him. She suspects she’s only hearing a fraction of it, adding that the scammers are “probably making more money than me.”

A much bigger fraud wave

Rose’s story lands inside a much larger trend. According to CNBC‘s Sarah Agostino, imposter scams were the most reported type of fraud to the Federal Trade Commission for the fifth year in a row in 2025, with people who lost money reporting a combined $3.5 billion in losses. Total fraud losses reported to the FTC hit about $15.9 billion, a record.

CNBC also reported that losses are being driven by a rise in people scammed out of $100,000 or more, which happens more often to victims 60 and older. That lines up with what Rose sees: she told the Post most of the people fooled by her impersonators skew older, though she suspects younger fans get caught too and are too embarrassed to say so.

AI is making it worse. Rose said she worries more men will fall for these schemes as the tech improves, and an AARP fraud expert told CNBC the old advice to watch for bad spelling and grammar has “gone out the window” now that scammers can polish any message. We’ve seen the same AI-fueled copycat problem hit creators in other ways, like the wave of cloned OnlyFans search sites.

What she wants fans to know

Rose said her teams have tracked down at least one person suspected of using her identity, and that case is still under investigation. She also wants victims to know they have nothing to be ashamed of. “If somebody has spent months believing they’re building a genuine relationship, finding out the entire thing was fake can be devastating,” she said.

Her rule for fans is simple: “I won’t message you asking for money. That’s the most important thing: I will never come to you begging for anything.”

The takeaway

For big creators, impersonation isn’t a side annoyance anymore. It’s a cost of doing business, with paid teams just to keep up. For fans, the lesson is the one Rose spelled out: the real creator lives on her official pages, and anyone who moves the chat to another app and starts asking for money isn’t her.

Image: Social media app icons on a smartphone screen, by mikemacmarketing, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.