ROMEO, Mich. – A Michigan teen wanted a normal high school experience. But someone decided to use his photos and videos and create social media accounts pretending to be him.
That person created fake accounts posing as Daniel “DJ” Phillips, 19, of Washington Township, using them to spread false information, talk to girls, and more, creating a web of deception that garnered thousands of views on TikTok and led to real-life confrontations.
DJ was a sophomore in high school at the time. After getting law enforcement involved, he and his family learned that the person behind the accounts was a 15-year-old girl from Novi, whom he didn’t even know.
Now, he’s sharing the story of his harrowing experience with cyberbullying and catfishing, highlighting the devastating impact of online impersonation and the challenges that victims face in seeking justice.
You can watch his full impact statement further down on this page.
How it started
DJ Phillips is now a freshman at Michigan State University, but the situation began in the Fall of 2023, during his sophomore year at Romeo High School.
DJ posted a video on his TikTok account after a football game against Anchor Bay, showing the team celebrating their win. Although DJ later deleted the video, it resurfaced on a fake TikTok account.
One of his teammates told him about the account, which had one of his football photos as the profile picture.
“I took it down later, but the following week, there was a screen recording of it,” DJ said. “And all the watermarks and everything was taken down. So it just looks like if you post it, it would be your video. It was posted on this random account. One of my teammates, who is also in the same gym class as me, comes over and he’s like, ‘Why are you posting this? Like, it’s a little feminine to have a spam or like a secondary account to do it.’ He’s like, ‘That’s what girls do.’ I was like, ‘That’s not me.’ And he’s, like, ‘Yeah, right.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m serious. I didn’t post that.’”
The account only had 30 followers at the time, with the video only having a couple of hundred views, and at this point, DJ thought it was his teammates pranking him.
But then, the online harassment escalated.
Now, DJ admits that at one point early in high school, he did make a poor choice and posted a photo where someone pointed a gun to his head. He said he quickly took that photo down.
But he said the online harassment that was happening to him during his sophomore year was frightening.
Online impersonation escalates
About a month and a half after DJ found out about the fake account, it started gaining more attention.
“That’s when everybody is starting to talk about it,” DJ said.
DJ said the girl would delete videos she posted, then keep reposting them on the fake account to get more views. He also noticed the TikTok account’s description kept changing, sometimes saying he was from New Jersey, other times Michigan, and occasionally listing “IMG Academy” in the bio.
Once the account really started to get views, the girl began posting defamatory content, including false claims about DJ getting a DUI and fabricated stories about his personal life.
DJ explained that the girl would take photos that he had originally posted on his real account, or ones that his friends had posted. One of those photos showed DJ and his friend sleeping during a long car ride.
The girl took that photo and reposted it on the fake account with the caption “hide the booze,” trying to imply that DJ had passed out drunk in the car.
She then posted a narrative that he had gotten kicked off the football team because of a DUI, when in reality, he couldn’t play football and had to take online classes due to shoulder and knee surgeries.
One day, he was sitting at lunch when the school resource officer tapped his shoulder and asked him to go with him to his office.
DJ initially thought this was over an unpaid parking pass, but the officer said, “Did you ask a girl from Novi for nudes?”
He told DJ that a girl had called the school, asked if DJ Phillips was real, and then told him that DJ had asked her for nudes.
The teen showed the resource officer his accounts, explained everything that was happening with the fake accounts, and asked him to initiate a case number for this.
DJ said fake TikTok and Snapchat accounts were created, and then, once those gained more publicity, the girl also created an account impersonating DJ’s father.
This is also when DJ’s parents learned about what was going on.
Fake account leads to confrontations with strangers
Even after the school started a case, the posts continued, and the TikTok account gained significant traction during the summer of 2024, reaching its peak popularity before DJ’s senior year.
The online harassment spilled into his daily life and caused multiple issues for DJ during a concert he attended at Pine Knob.
It was his first concert, and he experienced multiple confrontations with strangers who believed the false narratives.
One girl walked up to him, grabbed his shoulder to look at him, and said, “Are you DJ Phillips?”
When DJ confirmed that he was, the girl said, “I know what you did to my friend, and I’m going to find out the colleges you applied for. They’re going to see what type of person you are.”
That was his first confrontation of the evening.
After that, DJ said a group of guys walked up to him, and one said, “DJ.”
DJ said he turned and said hi to them, because he’s bad with faces and couldn’t recall if he had met them before.
“Stop flirting with my girlfriend,” the guy said to DJ.
DJ told him he didn’t know who he was talking about.
“Yeah, I am talking to you, and if you don’t stop talking to my girlfriend, there’s going to be a problem,” the stranger said.
DJ told the guy he was still lost and didn’t know what he was talking about. The guy then said DJ’s home address out loud, stood there for a second, and then walked away.
“By this point, my night is kind of ruined. I don’t know what to do,” DJ said.
He was worried that he was going to get jumped for something he didn’t even do.
DJ said he still tried to have a good time, despite what had already happened, but he had another confrontation with a third person.
While he was talking to one of his friends, a girl spilled a drink on his back.
When he turned around, the girl was just standing there looking at what she was drinking.
“A sorry would be nice,” DJ said to this girl.
She looked at him and said, “You’re DJ Phillips.”
“You could say sorry for spilling something on my shirt,” DJ responded.
Then, the girl smacked him.
“She just smacks me,” DJ said. “She smacks me, and like everybody around in a 5-10 foot radius is looking at me.”
The girl then stumbled away, and DJ said he acted like it was fine afterward because he didn’t want to stress out the friends he came with or their parents.
Discovering the person behind the fake account
After months of escalating harassment, DJ’s parents reached out to law enforcement. In September 2024, they filed a report with the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators traced the fake Snapchat account to its creation date of Feb. 25, 2020. By October 2024, the email linked to the account had been changed from one associated with the impersonator to a fake email using DJ’s name.
Using GEO logs and IP addresses tied to the Snapchat account, investigators pinpointed a location in Novi. They also reviewed chat logs from the account.
“It appeared the suspect shared a large number of image and video files of Daniel with other Snapchat users as if they were portraying themselves as Daniel,” the investigator wrote in their report.
The investigator went on to state, “I did observe one conversation with a Snapchat user (name redacted) where ‘drakephi’ (the fake account) made unsolicited sexual comments to this user.”
In a November 2024 interview, DJ told investigators about the fake Snapchat account and said he believed the same person was behind the TikTok account named “djphill12,” which had nearly 20,000 followers and was also impersonating him.
That’s when the family learned the perpetrator was a 15-year-old girl from Novi. DJ and his parents did not recognize her name or photos and had no idea who she was. Local 4 is not sharing the girl’s name since she is a minor.
In December 2024, the investigator contacted the girl’s mother and informed her that her daughter was a suspect in a case involving fake social media accounts. The mother said her daughter was about to arrive home from school and promised to call back after speaking with her.
While waiting for the call back, the investigator noticed the fake TikTok account had been deleted, according to the police report.
When the mother called back, she put the phone on speaker. The girl admitted to creating the Snapchat account, two TikTok accounts pretending to be DJ, and an account impersonating DJ’s father. She said she deleted the accounts after learning authorities had contacted her mother.
The girl told police she did not know DJ or his father. When asked about her motive, she claimed “it was only for likes on social media,” according to the report.
She also said she obtained all images and videos used on the accounts from people on DJ’s friends lists. She denied requesting nude photos or having any involvement in what happened to DJ at the Pine Knob concert. Charges were filed in the case in February 2025.
Parents react
When DJ’s parents learned that it was a young girl who lived in another county, whom DJ didn’t even know, they were “shocked” and “confused.”
“The comfort level of someone to not only do this to him, but to get his parents involved,” said DJ’s dad, Danny Phillips, referring to how the girl had also been impersonating him.
This prolonged cyberbullying campaign took a significant toll on DJ’s mental health and social life.
“It was confusing,” DJ’s mom, Margie Phillips, said. “I’ve read, and I heard about that happening, like in the form of catfishing, different things like that. So it was bizarre, there was no name recognition when I heard it for me -- especially for Daniel.”
His mother noticed concerning changes.
“It took a toll. He wasn’t sleeping ... I started to watch him kind of close off,” she said.
Margie said the girl was pressed for motive in court, but still stood behind the fact that she randomly picked DJ.
“That’s not too young to know what you’re doing and what it’s doing to the victim,” DJ’s mom said.
Court hearing
The now-17-year-old girl and DJ were in court on Dec. 16, 2025, before Judge Lisa Gorcyca. The case had been moved from Macomb County to Oakland County since that’s where the girl lives.
During the hearing, DJ got his chance to address the impersonator and read his impact statement detailing how these fake accounts changed his life and caused him to have suicidal thoughts.
‘Why me?’: DJ’s victim impact statement
“By impersonating me online, spreading lies, and soliciting photos while pretending to be me, (she) permanently changed my life by destroying my reputation, my confidence, and my sense of safety. This went on for three years, my entire high school experience, making me suicidal while I was still trying to keep my grades up to get into a good college,” DJ said as part of his statement.
He detailed how the lies she posted about him “spread instantly” and impacted other people’s perception of him.
“I’ve had people call me a f** in my face,” DJ said. “Openly insult me and treat me as if I’m the person she pretended I was. Even though I could never imagine doing those things to another human being. I’ve also been called a s***, and a w**** because of the fake Snapchat accounts she created of me, pretending to be me, asking minors for inappropriate pictures. Some of them being some people’s girlfriends. Starting false romantic relationships with girls and flat-out being blatantly disrespectful to women as a whole. This created the norm that people thought they knew everything about me and knew what type of person I was without even talking to me. Reaching points where trying to explain myself won’t even work because people won’t give me the time of day to listen.”
As DJ concluded his statement, he asked the girl, “Why me?”
However, the girl didn’t have a clear answer for DJ.
Girl’s explanation for impersonating DJ online
When the girl read her statement, she said there was “no excuse” for what she did.
“I flat out ruined someone’s life with just simple selfish decisions that if it would happen to anybody in my family, I would feel deeply, deeply hurt because of what happened,” the girl said, in part. “It -- it’s not OK. It was immature. It was false judgment. It was all for self, uh -- self, uh -- I -- I’m not sure what -- but it was -- it was for my self-improvement.”
The judge questioned the girl about why she targeted DJ, and she replied that one day, DJ was suggested to her on social media. Her attorney explained that suggestions pop up randomly.
That’s when DJ explained to the judge that the accounts are suggested to people because they might be mutuals and people who live in the same area. He told the judge that he and the girl have mutuals and live about 30 miles apart from each other.
The judge asked the girl if she had anything to say about that since Daniel didn’t believe her explanation, and the girl explained that his video showed up on her “for you” page on TikTok, and it could have been connected to the area, but still said she didn’t know if they knew people in common.
After that, the judge persisted, asking how much counseling she’s had to find out why she would intentionally hurt someone she doesn’t know.
“I promise I had absolutely no intention of hurting the victim,” the girl said in response. “I -- I really was extremely selfish and was focusing on what I was gonna gain from this account, uh, in terms of admiration and attention from the account. And I had completely dismissed who was actually behind the screen. But I -- I never knew that what I was doing caused such great harm.”
DJ then spoke up again, saying that the girl not only created fake accounts pretending to be him, but also created an account pretending to be his dad, following girls and reposting other things. He said he had to hold his mother while she cried about all of that.
“What pleasure or attention do you get out of that?” DJ asked.
“I cannot agree with you saying that you had zero idea of who I am,” DJ said. “Zero idea of mutuals. Zero idea of anything. And you had -- you weren’t trying to hurt me. If you wanted -- if you wanted attention using my pictures, I understand. But the -- that’s just not -- it -- it didn’t seem like that’s what you were doing.”
While the girl said she chose DJ at random, she admitted that she was just focused on the attention and views she was getting from the account.
In the interview with Local 4, DJ emphasized the severity of what she was doing, asking minors for nudes, while pretending to be DJ and his dad.
“I wouldn’t even do that to my worst enemy,” DJ said. “And she said that she didn’t even know me, or that I lived in Michigan, which was another lie.”
Consequences the girl faces
The girl never gave a more concrete answer in court to explain her actions.
After hearing more about the case, the judge put the girl on probation and took consent under advisement.
The girl was ordered to the following:
- Participate in individual counseling
- 15 hours of community service or work a part-time job
- Pay for the victim’s therapy costs
- No access to social media, unless for college purposes, with parental supervision
- No contact with DJ or his family
- No alcohol or drugs, and she must agree to random drug screening
The girl currently has two part-time jobs, so she won’t have to do the community service.
She also had to write an essay to the court, and observe a felony judge’s criminal call.
The judge said she could also give DJ a certified court order that he could carry around with him, showing that he is not the perpetrator.
The girl’s name can’t be on this order, because she was a minor, but the judge said they can put her initials, the case number, and make it clear that DJ is a victim.
‘There are no repercussions’
DJ and his family expressed disappointment with what they view as lenient consequences.
“The system prioritizes the rehabilitation over accountability,” his mother said. “It’s just that simple.”
DJ’s dad emphasized that the whole time this situation was going on, his son was also a minor.
“So, you want one minor to be untouched, no record, really no punishment,” he said. “But the other minor that has to go through this -- there are no repercussions.”