Influencer Reyna Nguyen shared her story of a terrifying experience during a luxurious Swiss holiday that went wrong when a hotel employee threatened to expose her personal information unless she paid him thousands of dollars.
Nguyen was traveling alone for a ski trip in Switzerland, spending several days in Zurich before returning to the United States. Because Nguyen has many followers online, she always takes extra precautions when traveling alone, choosing luxury hotels for their security. “When I travel alone these days, I typically try to stay at really nice hotels because I understand that it’s safe,” she explained.
Not long after she checked into one of the city’s best hotels, a stranger who apparently knew exactly where she was staying sent an unusual comment on her Instagram account. “I got to the hotel, I checked in, and I got a notification on my phone for an Instagram comment,” Nguyen said. It was something like, “Nice to see you in Zurich, Miss Nguyen.”
At first, she didn’t give it much thought and assumed it was someone who recognized her from her online content. The situation got worse when Nguyen received an email threatening to publish her personal information unless she paid 6,700 Swiss francs. The sender seemed to have plenty of information about her life, including her property, places where she used to live, and even poker wins. “You played with me, and now it’s my turn,” the email read. “I will write in every post that you do on the internet your real name and address.” The message included some pictures of the property Nguyen had been renting in the past, making her realize how much that stranger knew about her.
Nguyen tried to trace the Instagram account that had contacted her and discovered that the man worked at the hotel where she was staying. His Facebook and LinkedIn profiles listed the same hotel as his workplace, and Nguyen realized that it was the same man who had checked her in. “He was staring at me the whole time,” she said. Nguyen believes that he got her name while checking her in and then tried to find more information about her online. “I think all he did was Google my name,” she said, adding that the directories which are available online gave him a lot of information about her previous addresses.
Traveling alone in a foreign country, Nguyen was concerned about her physical safety. She did not inform the hotel staff about what happened, suspecting that it might warn the employee before she had figured out what to do.
“I didn’t want them to know what I was doing until I had finalized a plan,” she said.
Nguyen later believed the man had been scammed by someone pretending to be her on Telegram.
“The scammer stole photos from my social media accounts, including Snapchat, [Influencer] and Instagram, and used them to create a relationship with the victim,” she explained.
According to Nguyen, the man had lost thousands of dollars to a fake account using her identity and believed she was responsible.
“They scammed him out of thousands, and then he found me because I just walked into it through his door,” she noted.
Although she was threatened, Nguyen said she felt sorry for the man, as he had become a victim of a scam.
“I felt bad for him,” she said.
After a second threatening email, Nguyen asked three Zurich lawyers specializing in privacy and doxxing cases of famous people for help. All of them refused to represent her case as soon as they learned which hotel was involved, explaining that they had professional connections to the hotel and might have a conflict of interest.
Then she turned to some lawyers in the U.S. who warned her that legal action might be costly.
Nguyen eventually decided not to take any action. She feared that filing a lawsuit could make this man seek revenge, since he had information about her property. She had only recently bought a house in the U.S. and could not just sell it and move somewhere else if she felt unsafe.
“I was very afraid for a long time,” she remembered.
This experience changed the way Nguyen approached personal safety and online privacy. When she had an opportunity to move to Australia, she gladly accepted it as a chance to start afresh somewhere where she felt less vulnerable to being traced. She also started using online privacy tools to remove her personal information from online directories.
This situation showed that scammers still create fake accounts using her photos and identity.
Nguyen now spends her mornings finding and reporting impersonation accounts to protect people from being misled by those profiles.
“Every morning I have one task: manually report all impersonators,” she said. “Even when I report the accounts, new ones pop up every single day.”
She believes scammers have made a lot of money using her image, and she worries about people who keep getting scammed by these fake profiles.
