Exclusive | My best friend digitally kidnapped my baby, sent her pictures to strangers and pretended to be her mother
Marissa Layne is a mama bear who’s fiercely protective of her cubs. As the mother of a son under 10 and a one-year-old baby girl, the married midwesterner thought she was protecting her little ones’ privacy by only sharing photos of them with a small circle of close friends and family members via her private Facebook profile.But that protective measure wasn’t enough to prevent her infant daughter’s images from being secretly stolen and misused by someone Layne trusted with her life. “My best friend of 15 years digitally kidnapped my baby,” the stay-at-home mother told The Post.Having no idea until another mom tipped her off, the 25-year-old’s former close friend, whom she chose to refer to as “Lucy,” posed as the mother of her baby to colleagues and bosses, faked a birth story and disgustingly texted pictures of the little girl wearing next to nothing to strangers. “It’s such a violation.It is so scary.
It’s altered my brain chemistry in the most astounding way,” said Layne, who’s been prescribed anti-anxiety medications since learning of Lucy’s offense in March.“[My family and I have] gone from feeling safe to not feeling safe.
From being able to sleep to not being able to sleep.From feeling comfortable in your world to feeling like you’re exposed down to the bones,” she explained.Unlike the extortion scheme of the same name — a con in which scammers use the internet or phone to trick victims into paying exorbitant ransoms for the release of their loved ones, per the FBI — the type of digital kidnapping Layne experienced occurs when ne’er-do-wells steal a minor’s photo from social media to use to their warped advantage. A bone-chilling form of cyberstalking, digital kidnapping is in the family of online crimes that affect roughly 7.5 million people each year, with 67 percent of victims targeted by someone they know, according to 2026 data. From reposting images of tots, passing them off as their own by creatin...