The Impersonation Economy: Copyright Pretexts, Synthetic Identity, Account Markets and Social-Media Scam Supply Chains

This independent research report explores social media impersonation fraud as a modular economy of transferable trust. It identifies three functions of copyright: copyrighted content being duplicated to produce credibility, real rights-enforcement mechanisms being abused, and manufactured copyright or platform-support messages being used as social-engineering pretexts. Topics include account markets, synthetic identity services, verification claims, misleading advertising, private-message migration, payment extraction and recovery impersonation. It presents the Trust-Asset Stack, an attribution protocol, a loss-accounting methodology and an incident-level evidence schema. The study utilizes official statistics, legal and enforcement records, disclosures by platforms, academic research and carefully labeled investigative reporting available by 10 August 2026. It also highlights important measurement limitations and proposes a Pakistan-centred framework for future field research. This is a working paper that has not been peer-reviewed.