Hi, my name is Hanny and I am trying to raise funds to pay for the lawyer who can get my stolen identity and content back.

About a decade ago, when I was still a primary school teacher, I accidentally discovered a new type of object in space (see Wikipedia: Hanny’s Voorwerp) and I was asked to represent the citizen science project related to this discovery, as a volunteer. I gladly accepted, learned a lot from this myself, and kept a diary about all of this on the internet. But then I was diagnosed with a chronic illness, and I had to take a step back from this, as well as teaching.

As a result of this, the domain for my website was not renewed on time, and someone else took it AND stole my texts, photos and all my content to pretend it is still me posting on there. Meanwhile, they were advertising their products. Language courses at first, and currently even porn.

I feel rather violated for not being able to control my own old diary, which I no longer wish to share. Besides this, I now receive angry messages from people blaming me for the porn links. (My email address is still on there as well, I’m not linking any of this here for obvious reasons). I also feel bad to the people working on these citizen science projects still, as all I ever wanted to do was tell people how important this work is.

I have actually known this for a while, and I have been taking steps to try and get it sorted. I wasn’t planning on posting about it, as I really don’t want people to go and have a look. But I guess it is good to state here that I am not responsible for anything on there anymore, at least not currently.

What I have tried is getting the domain back myself. I also tried to get it out of Google’s high ranking and I tried to take the link off of Wikipedia. Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in any of that. I have an insurance for legal aid and I brought the case to them, but they eventually told me it’s out of their jurisdiction, so they won’t cover any of the costs.

Now I have found a lawyer in the UK, who said they could help me get my website and content back, which would cost me £2500,- While it feels incredibly unfair I have to pay this amount to get something back that was stolen from me, I am also thankful for this chance and so I have been saving money towards this.

I never imagined this could happen to me, obviously, but here we are. If you have been reading this completely, I would like to thank you for doing so. Any contributions, in money or in sharing this, is greatly appreciated. Stay safe on the internet!

Hanny.