Profiles of unsuspecting members of social networking sites and home pages are being increasingly replicated, pictures morphed and abused at an alarming rate. The targets are mostly women.

In some cases, young women have found their pictures morphed and used for pornography.

A 22-year-old university student from Bathinda, Punjab, had to put in a frantic appeal to the web master and others users of the net working site she was on. Someone had stolen her pictures and contact details on her user profile and created a fake mirror profile.

She got to know of it only after she was flooded with obscene calls on her cell phone. "It was impossible to tell everyone who had read the fake profile that it was not me," she says.

For a student of MES College, Bangalore, the experience was even more harrowing. Her pictures were morphed and posted on the Internet. "She was disturbed for many days. She had put up pictures for her friends to see," her teacher told the Hindustan Times on Saturday.